Not only can Officer Lisa Jones see where the gunshots are coming from in the nation's capital, she can hear them.
A pop, a pause, two more quick pops, at 6:45 a.m. on a street corner in Northeast D.C.
A single crack at 1:31 a.m. on another street in Southeast.
Both shootings occurred hours apart on the same day, haunting sounds of violence captured by noise monitors and enhanced on Jones' computer in the Metropolitan Police Department's dispatch center.
She played the recordings for me on a visit this month. Earlier that day, an officer had listened to the gunshots just seconds after they occurred. The computer mapped out the nearly precise spots from which they had come, and a dispatcher sent squad cars speeding to the scenes. No one was hit in either shooting.
D.C. police first got noise monitors from a company called ShotSpotter in the summer of 2006, enabling them to quickly identify where and when gunfire occurs, and they now have it set up in nearly every quadrant of the city in one of the largest deployments of this technology in the country. The monitors measure noises from multiple angles and alert police when gunshots are detected.
Jones and other dispatchers see the alert pop up on their screens, complete with a red dot on a map. They can immediately listen to what the computer picked up, and if they believe the computer to be right, dispatch an officer and an ambulance. Assistant Police Chief Patrick A. Burke said many of the gunshots detected by ShotSpotter are never reported by the public.
"We can get help to people right away and save lives, and we have," Burke said during a tour of the dispatch center at police headquarters on Indiana Avenue.
I went to Washington because a similar system is being tested in Baltimore. The Johns Hopkins University has put up 93 sound sensors in and around Charles Village. The school received the devices for free from SECURES Gunshot Detection System, and monitoring began Nov. 20 in the school's public safety office in Remington.
Baltimore officials say they are still studying the technology and will wait to see how the system works at Hopkins before deciding whether to invest. I was impressed by what I saw at Hopkins, though at the time I visited the system had only detected two possible gunshots. The sensors are not exactly in the city's most crime-prone neighborhoods.
