Last week, Johns Hopkins University installed a system of senors around its campus that enables police to pinpoint the location of shootings. The SECURES Gunshot Detection System was unveiled on Thursday with sensors put up around Homewood and Charles Village.

Not the best place for gunshot monitors, I argued last week, given that the neighborhoods are among the safest in the city, but the company is donating the system to Hopkins to show it off, so the university gets to choose where it goes.

Today, about 1:38 p.m. (going by newsroom clocks) a police dispatcher notified an officer that the system had detected a gunshot coming from 349 E. 37th St. Our police reporter, Justin Fenton, who sits next to a police scanner, heard a male voice answer at 1:49 p.m., that he needed car to respond to the location. He noted that the discharge would've come from within 10 feet of that area.

A short time later, about 1:51 p.m., an officer said he was there and the building was vacant and that someone sitting on a nearby front step said they hadn't heard anything. They said they would investigate further.

Turns out it wasn't a gunshot at all. Here's a response from Hopkins:

The new gunshot detection system DID NOT detect a gunshot this afternoon. According to Ed Skrodzki, the sound picked up by the system did not meet the threshold for a gunshot, but did register loud enough for campus security to notify the Baltimore City Police Department’s Northern District, which responded to the location and found nothing. This is the first time that the gunshot detection system has gone off since the system became operational last Thursday.

Skrodzki reiterated that when acoustic parameters for a gunshot are met, the system flashes a red starburst on the TV monitors at the Remington building. When the sound is below these parameters, but still suspicious (could be a muffled shot inside a car or building or some other loud noise), the system puts out a lower level alert. In this case, one of these lower-level alerts (no starburst) came in at 1:37 p.m. today at 349 E. 27th St. Johns Hopkins security immediately notified Baltimore City police. Again, police went out and found no problems or reports of gunshots heard or anything else suspicious at that location.

Skrodzki said police are interested in checking out any sound  picked up by the gunshot detection system, in part, because they want to determine how the system is operating in these early days and because police want to rule out gunfire.

Tracey A. Reeves

Director, Office of News and Information