Page 15 - Campus Security & Life Safety, May/June 2021

"These findings and practices mean that you, an innocent bystander, could be law enforcement’s best option during those first few seconds of shooting, because they are still waiting for someone to call 911 before they even know to respond."
By Christian Connors
is initiated. To be most effective, the gunshot detection system will alert before the first 911 call and integrate with mass notification, video, public address systems and other alarms.
The real power in gunshot detection is leveraging integration that automates alerts to multiple parties simultaneously, including campus security, students, staff and visitors, so appropriate response actions can be immediately initiated.
A Military Approach to the Active Shooter
Before we dive into how gunshot detection technology works and how it applies to a campus setting, it is important to note the technology’s roots in history before it was developed for commercial applications. As a capability, gunshot detection first originated in a government initiative in 1995, and spon- sored by a research arm of the Department of Defense called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA
sponsored the development of prototype sys- tems that paired acoustic muzzle blast and ballistic shock wave signatures to predict the location of gunfire events and associated shooter locations. Six different systems were developed and tested, but it wasn’t until the Iraq War in 2003 that the need for these sys- tems became critical.
U.S. troops were battling against an aggressive insurgency while traversing some of the roughest terrain on earth in noisy Humvees, and they often did not know they were being shot at until a fellow soldier was hit. Knowing they were being shot at, and being able to identify where the shots were coming from would give them a lifesaving and tactical advantage.
DARPA selected the company that had produced the most successful technology from their trials, BBN Technologies out of Cambridge, MA, and challenged them to rapidly develop vehicle gunshot detection systems that could not only localize a shooter to plus or minus 15-degree accuracy, but it also had to report within one second of a shot and do so on vehicles traveling up to 60 miles per hour on rough terrain and in harsh environments. That system was quickly deployed and is still in use today, credited with saving the lives of soldiers in military conflicts across the globe.
The Active Shooter Threat
In the 1990s and 2000s the United States wit- nessed a rising and disturbing trend of mass shooting incidents happening in schools, workplaces, movie theaters and other every- day environments. This created an influx of active shooter solutions to the market includ- ing ballistic glass, door locks and panic but- tons. While they might be useful, these solu- tions still do not address the lack of critical information flow as a shooting incident unfolds – the what, when, how and where questions still need to be answered.
To address these problems, Shooter Detec- tion Systems began adapting the military gunshot detection system, known as Boo- merang, for indoor environments and
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