Ex-Boston Police Commissioner Bill Bratton dismissed the “foolish” assertions that ShotSpotter technology is racially biased, saying the politicians making those claims are more concerned with scoring political points than saving lives.

Bratton, who also led police departments in New York City and Los Angeles, said he’s been “flabbergasted” by the recent criticism leveled at, and the call for a federal probe into, ShotSpotter — a gunshot detection system that garners a rapid police response and has been used in Boston for nearly 20 years.

“Effectively, you want to put police where the violence is occuring, where the gunfire is occurring,” Bratton told the Herald Friday, saying that the machine simply informs officers who already have a presence in those high-crime areas.

“This idea that it’s bringing more police into the minority neighborhoods,” Bratton said of the meat of the criticism, “I don’t know of any minority neighborhood in America that doesn’t want more police, and any politician that tells you any differently doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about.”

Bratton, who sits on the board for SoundThinking, the company that produces ShotSpotter, and the company’s president Ralph Clark, who visited Boston on Friday, explained that the technology is placed where the crime is statistically occurring in Boston, covering eight square miles.

“You’re not going to put ShotSpotter up in Beacon Hill where there probably hasn’t been a shot fired since the Revolutionary War,” Bratton said. “But you do want to put them out in Mattapan, Roxbury, Dorchester.”

Statistically, Bratton added, “most of the gunshot violence in the city occurs in the same neighborhoods, which tend to be unfortunately, poor neighborhoods, tend to be the minority neighborhoods.”

Data compiled by the Boston Police Department last year showed gun violence was highly concentrated in four neighborhoods, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, Mattapan and Roxbury, from 2018-22.

That doesn’t make the system racist, however, Clark said, noting that it detects gunfire but not the race of the shooter. The technology, which places sensors that detect audio aimed at transmitting the sound of gunshots, garners a rapid response, particularly late at night when people in the area don’t call 911.

“That’s the game changer,” Clark said. “And that’s how we’re closing the public safety gap. Because now we enable a very fast, precise response of not only law enforcement agencies but also first responders that can get there and if they find a gunshot wound victim bleeding out they can apply tourniquets and save a life.”

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Bratton and Clark were largely responding to a letter written this week by three members of the city’s Congressional delegation — U.S. Senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Ayanna Pressley — calling for a federal investigation into Department of Homeland Security funding allocated to ShotSpotter.

The lawmakers’ criticism in the letter was informed by a report released last month by the American Civil Liberties Union, which claimed that Boston Police records showed that nearly 70% of ShotSpotter alerts resulted in no evidence of gunfire from 2020-22 and was dismissed as misinformation by both Clark and Bratton.

“If we’re producing false positives the way the ACLU claims, there is no customer that would work with us,” Clark said, noting that the false positives may be due to there being no ballistic evidence recovered which is being conflated as no shooting having occurred.

Clark drew particular attention to the ACLU’s claim that noise from a piñata at a South End birthday party set off ShotSpotter. The example was cited by the council president, Ruthzee Louijeune, and the three Congressional leaders this week, but debunked days later by a Boston Police report obtained by the Herald.

An ACLU spokesperson said the organization confirmed the inaccuracy of the example — a police report stated officers responded to the birthday party based on a radio call for shots fired rather than activation of the ShotSpotter system — and removed it from the report, but stood by the rest of its analysis.

“There is significant evidence that ShotSpotter has serious flaws, resulting in potential impacts on civil liberties,” an ACLU spokesperson said. “Several independent analyses show similar results.”

“A range of examples exists to demonstrate the technology’s flaws, including but not limited to reports of fireworks at a birthday party, backfiring dirt bikes, and a metal plate in the road mistaken for gunshots,” the spokesperson added.

City councilors this week also cited the ACLU report when petitioning for Boston’s Police Commissioner Michael Cox to delay signing a new contract extending the city’s use of ShotSpotter.

Cox declined the request, saying that he “would not be willing to delay a tool that saves lives,” a decision that was commended by Bratton.

The city’s three-year agreement, at a cost of $782,610, expires next month.

When asked whether Mayor Michelle Wu favored continued use of ShotSpotter in Boston, her office pointed to this week’s comments by Cox.

“The technology has proven itself to be extraordinarily effective in the sense of saving lives,” Bratton said. “I just shake my head at these politicians and so-called community activists who are supposedly all about saving lives.

“They’re not saving lives by attacking ShotSpotter,” he said. “They’re basically just trying to make political points.”

SoundThinking CEO Ralph Clark, whose company make the ShotSpotter system. (Matt Stone/Boston Herald)