New Haven Independent

Using new crime-fighting technology, police were able to pinpoint the shots’ point of origin within seconds. Top New Haven cops — including Assistant Police Chief Pete Reichard (pictured) — and visiting officers from nearby towns observed approvingly as a satellite image showed where the shooters had fired from.

It was all part of a Friday morning demonstration of the city’s new ShotSpotter system, a network of 22 sensors that provides instant notification of gunshots in the city and triangulates their locations to within 10 yards. The system was installed one month ago in New Haven’s “crime corridor,” a 1.5-square-mile area including the Dixwell/Newhallville area, where most shootings have occurred.

Police say the system will cut down on response times for shootings, since ShotSpotter can report gunshots faster and more accurately than relying on 911 calls.

The city paid for the system with a $374,000 federal grant received last year.

James Beldock (pictured), CEO of California-based ShotSpotter, was on hand at the police training academy on Sherman Parkway for a demonstration of the technology on Friday. Beldick, a ‘97 graduate of Yale in Greek and Latin, explained how the system works before the police presentation.

The system has a guarantee of 80 percent accuracy when it comes to identification, he said. That means that most of the time ShotSpotter won’t be tricked into a thinking a backfiring car is a gun being fired. The system becomes more accurate as times goes on, he said. “It’s learning the actual acoustic environment of the city.”

When the ShotSpotter “hears” a gunshot, it sends a signal to police headquarters, where a buzzer is heard and a red dot appears on a map. Seconds later, the audio of the incident is transmitted, so that police can listen and make sure that the sound was a gunshot.

Beldock said that there is no danger that the system could be used to record or listen to people on the street. “It’s a really fair question,” he said. “The system does not trigger on anything but gunshots.” It will only transmit audio when triggered by a loud, gunshot-like sound. Then it records just four seconds of audio, he said.

The ShotSpotter sensors are no more powerful than the microphone in a cellphone, and they’re mounted on rooftops, he said. They can’t pick up conversations on the street below.

His system offers a vast improvement over 911 phonecalls, Beldick said. Only 20 percent of gunshots are reported through 911, he said. “That’s because people don’t call,” he said. Or they become accustomed to gunfire and stop phoning it in.

When people do call, they might not live at the scene of the crime and they might not be able to point police in the right direction, Beldick said. ShotSpotter, on the other hand, can located gunshots to within 10 yards within seconds, tell officers how many shots have been fired and — to the trained ear — what kind of weapon was used and how many shooters there were.

Introducing the system to a roomful of police and press, Assistant Police Chief Reichard pointed to a couple of early successes of the ShotSpotter system. One was at 35 Whalley Ave., where the sensors reported a shooting that was never called in to 911. The other was on Sheffield Avenue. Police got there fast enough that they could “still smell the presence of gunpowder in the air,” Reichard said.

The ShotSpotter system has not yet led to any arrests, but it has allowed police to respond immediately and collect evidence, Reichard said.

As he spoke, an police officer fired shots at the range behind the training academy. Normally, the firing range is filtered out of the system. But on Friday each shot was followed by a loud sound effect erupting from a nearby computer, sounding like a laser gun had just been fired. A red dot appeared on the screen behind Reichard, followed by a sound wave image and another sound effect, indicating that the audio was ready. A staffer clicked a button and a recording of the gunshot played.

“This audio does show up in court cases quite often,” Beldock said. ShotSpotter is in 52 cities across the U.S., he said.

Since its installation on Sept. 16, ShotSpotter has picked up 32 verified shooting incidents, Reichard said.