It would seem that the path is relative to the working directory of the process, and does not support any URI syntax. This means I believe you need to type:
I just installed a recent version of Neo4j 4.2 and tried this and it worked. Could it be that you are missing parts of the shapefile? Note that shapefiles are not single files but a small set of files. For example, the command I ran was:
I think the shapefile standard has evolved over time. But we are using geotools 24.2, which is quite recent and should understand all versions of the shapefile. Could you zip up all the tl_2017_48_place.* files and attach them, so I can try import this exact shapefile locally?
I also notice that you have a directory named tl_2017_48_place containing the files also named tl_2017_48_place.*. So the original import statement should in fact be: