The Metropolitan Police Department is hoping that new sensory technology in some of the District’s tougher neighborhoods will slow down rising gun crimes.
Although crime in general has been falling, the District’s child homicide rate already is higher than last year’s number, with 13 children killed so far. Most of those deaths were from guns.
Police are investigating an apparent drive-by shooting Monday night in Northeast that left 8-year-old Chelsea Cromartie dead from a stray bullet.
The police department is reviewing a potential contract with Planning Systems Inc., a Reston information-technology company, to put up gunshot detectors in Washington’s high-crime spots, said Metropolitan Police Spokeswoman Rai Howell.
The device, known as “Secures,” acts as a radio transmitter, picking out gunshots from other noises and relaying the coordinates of gunfire to a local command center.
The devices are inside small, gray boxes that are wireless and can be placed on light posts, traffic signals, buildings and other locations on a city block, said Alan Friedman, Planning Systems’ president and chief executive officer.
The boxes generally are placed a few hundred yards apart and pinpoint a gunshot for the police within 10 feet of the occurrence, Mr. Friedman said.
They have been fine-tuned to discriminate a gunshot, which tends to have a high frequency, from other noises such as a car backfiring or firecrackers.
Once a gunshot is determined by multiple machines that are placed throughout city blocks, the machines send back to a central computer unit the coordinates and times of when the shot occurred.
The D.C. police department still must get approval from Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey and the D.C. City Council before going forward with the project, Ms. Howell said.
“We are having our legal team make sure that there is not a hint of stepping on any civil liberties” that could be violated by having machines — that essentially listen for gunshots — up in residential and business areas, she said.
Ms. Howell said she expected the department’s legal counsel to reach a decision on the deal within the next month, adding that it was too early to give an estimated cost for the devices or where they would be placed.
If the deal goes through, Washington would be the fourth city this year to use the devices. Police departments in Hampton Roads, Va., Newport News, N.C., and San Bernardino County, Calif., are using grants from the U.S. Justice Department, ranging from $500,000 to $993,500, to try the technology, Mr. Friedman said.
Planning Systems, with $40.8 million in sales and 300 employees, last month formed an alliance with Optisoft Inc., a Richardson, Texas, maker of specialized traffic signals, to sell a traffic signal with the gunshot detector built into the system.
Other versions of the gunshot detectors have sprouted up in major cities. Chicago recently installed the technology in 30 surveillance cameras already in high-crime corners. City officials plan to add another 50 cameras with the technology by late summer.
Ms. Howell said the gunfire detectors would be “groundbreaking” for the police department. Planning Systems initially contacted the D.C. police about the devices, “and we think they have great potential in assisting officers with investigations,” she said.
Planning Systems first introduced the technology in 2001 as part of a yearlong trial in Austin, Texas. The Austin Police Department, using a $770,000 grant from the Justice Department, put up 82 sensors in a one-mile radius in part of the city.
The boxes confirmed six gunshots in the first six months of the project, a lower number than officials were expecting, said Bruce Mills, who served as the assistant chief to the Austin police department during the test run.
One gunshot alert helped lead to an arrest 12 days after the boxes were installed, Mr. Mills said. By the end of the trial run, “it did exactly what was designed for.”
But there were several false alarms — some of the devices were installed near a cemetery that held military-gun salutes — and technical glitches. The devices also required more paperwork for patrol officers.
Ultimately, Austin’s police decided to not permanently install the devices because gun crimes had moved outside city limits, Mr. Mills said.
Although the gunshot detectors can give police clues on where a gunshot originated, which could help with gathering witnesses for a crime, they cannot locate where the bullet stops.
“It’s just another piece of the crime-prevention strategy, it is not the solution,” Mr. Friedman said.
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