DELAND, Fla. – A new gunshot detection system is helping Volusia deputies respond to shootings faster. Sheriff Mike Chitwood said his office started using the Raven gunshot detection system in November and already has the stats to show it’s working.
The sheriff said there are hundreds of sensors in a two-by-two square mile in the Spring Hill area of DeLand where they’re testing the system out.
If a shot is fired, the deputies will immediately get the alert on their system and head there.
“It tells them exactly where that location is. It triangulates through all of the sensors that are out there and it pinpoints where the shots were coming from,” said Chitwood.
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He said his deputies have had a half dozen incidents since the Raven gunshot detection system was installed where deputies got to the location of a shooting before a 911 call could even be made and found what the system picked up.
“Law enforcement was dispatched there immediately and in some of those cases they recovered the shell casings and in some of those cases they got there and the doers were still on scene,” he said.
The system costs the office about $70,000 a year.
The sheriff told News 6 they chose the Spring Hill area because of the rise in gun violence calls they responded to in that area in recent years.
He said now, along with the new “live 911″ system where deputies hear calls as they come in, and the new ballistic evidence testing system, the Raven is helping them curb gun violence.
“It took a while for the system to learn the difference between fireworks or firecrackers and gunshots and it’s really good now at discerning that,” Chitwood said.
It’s also helped investigators even out of the set radius.
The sheriff said it captured the gunshots in a murder last month a couple of miles northeast on the corner of Frankfort and New York Avenues. Detectives were able to listen back to the Raven’s recordings and determine when it exactly happened.
“A year from now, when a year is in and we have all the empirical data in and then we can say do we want to continue with it, is it worth the money, is it worth expanding? Those are all questions to be determined,” he said.
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