MARTINSVILLE, Va. (WFXR) – The City of Martinsville’s Police Department was given an $80,000 grant from Operation Ceasefire and the Attorney General’s Office, the money went to install gunshot detectors made by Flock Safety.
About two-thirds of Martinsville is covered by these gunshot detectors. The detectors are programmed to record the frequency of a gunshot, and send that information to officers.
“It’s almost instantaneous. Within 60 seconds. These officers will receive a text message on their cell phone with mapping data of where this gunshot originated,” said Chad Rhoads, the Deputy Chief of Police for Martinsvilee, “So everybody who’s out working the streets can go directly to the area where that gunshot originated.”
The department says these detectors do not record audio, just the frequency of a gunshot.
WFXR News is told the detectors also work alongside the city’s license plate readers to collect information from vehicles in the area of the gunshot.
“The more of them we have, the more densely populated those detectors are, the more accurate the signal we can get,” said Deputy Chief Rhoads, “As it stands now with the number of detectors we’ve got, we can zero in on the location of the gunshot to within just a few meters, 30 feet or so.”
The department says they hope these detectors will help to improve public safety. Deputy Chief Rhoads says the department would get five to ten shots fired calls a week.
“We want to lower the incidents of gun-related crime. And how we do that is by stepping up our response time to that,” said Deputy Chief Rhoads, “In days past, it may have been several minutes before we responded to the proper area. And now, you know, it could be within seconds that we can respond there.”
The detectors are going through troubleshooting right now to make sure they can distinguish between a gunshot and other loud noises, such as cars backfiring or slamming doors. The department hopes the detectors will be fully up and running by the end of January.