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(LAWRENCE, Ind.) — A new anti-school shooting device is getting its national rollout in Indy’s Lawrence Township Schools. 

Bodyworn by Utility, the Georgia company which supplies Lawence Police body cameras, has rolled out a gunshot detector. The box is the size of a deck of cards, and plugs discreetly into a wall outlet, staying in sleep mode unless there’s gunfire. If there is, the device instantly relays its exact location, along with the type of gun, to Lawrence police dispatch. It also notifies the rest of the campus so other classrooms can go into lockdown.

Lawrence Police Chief David Hofmann notes “seconds matter” in a school shooting. He says the detectors could save officers as much as 15 minutes in responding to a shooting call — they’ll know what room the gunfire began in, even before the teacher can dial 911. And while a gunman may have moved on from the scene of the last shot, Hofmann says even slightly dated information will narrow down where a shooter is and sharply reduce the chaos accompanying a shooting.

When gunfire actiates the device, it also activates a microphone, broadcasting to police the sound of what’s going on inside the school.

About 50 to 100 of the devices will be installed in each Lawrence Township school early next year. They’ll be in a monitoring-only mode for the first month or so to allow police to finalize procedures for the alarms, and to let Bodyworn test out whether there are any previously unnoticed glitches.

Bodyworn C-E-O Ted Davis says his company’s been working on the idea for two years, and other companies for even longer. They kept getting hung up on how to keep other loud noises from triggering the monitor. Davis says Bodyworn finally discovered that gunfire includes a 10-millisecond burst of sound across the entire audio spectrum, a burst unique to gunfire.

Bodyworn is donating the boxes to Lawrence Township to use Lawrence as a test market to show potential buyers elsewhere that they work. Davis estimates it’ll cost future buyers about 10-thousand dollars for the whole school district. He says the goal was to keep the price low enough to allow a local sponsor to underwrite purchases.

(Photo: Eric Berman/WIBC)