(phone ringing) - I actually never called in a gunshot, like, for the longest time.

- But it sounded to me more like a nail gun than anything else.

(nail gun popping) - There's not that many existing solutions.

- [Person] Pop, pop, pop.

- Boom, and I hear one that sounds like a ba-ba-boom.

(gun firing) (upbeat percussive music) - Here's how we're solving problems.

(upbeat percussive music) (faint speaking) Volunteers.

- [Person] Everybody, come around.

- Volunteers.

I'm Brian La Cour, I'm the treasurer for the North Austin Civic Association and... I've lived here for about 26 years, it was really beautiful.

The street was this kind of tree-lined street and it seemed quiet.

We knew that it wasn't the greatest neighborhood in the world, we weren't blind to that.

How many of you have actually heard gunshots from your home?

(upbeat percussive music) Has anyone not heard gunshots from their home?

- [Person] I probably... - [Newscaster] The police say someone reported hearing gunshots just before 8:00 tonight.

At the scene... - [Newscaster] Firing celebratory gunshots... - And I had a bullet in my roof, which is no fun.

(gun firing) (upbeat percussive music) - The problem we're trying to solve is illegal gunfire.

(upbeat percussive music) This can come in the form of celebratory gunfire, people shooting guns in the air or criminal activity involving guns.

(upbeat percussive music) This has been a problem for a long time.

For my part, I was looking for, I guess, a more technical solution to the problem.

I had been thinking for the longest time it'd be cool if, like, we could somehow triangulate what I heard and what other people might have heard, and figure out, like, where these things actually happened.

(upbeat percussive music) I came upon some research from Vanderbilt University... - My name is Will Hedgecock, I currently work at Vanderbilt University... - Who had designed this gunshot detection system.

- But it was a really interesting project.

- I reached out to him.

- Brian, he actually found us.

- His initial reaction was... - No.

(laughs) - I tried this in Nashville and nobody wanted it.

- We had fully moved away from gunshot localization.

- I told him, "Well, I think my community is different," so I managed to convince him that it was worth giving this a shot.

(upbeat funk music) Vanderbilt's going to make about 10 or so devices, we're gonna do some controlled fire testing.

We identified the people that we needed to solve the problem, had the right solution for that problem and we had a clear plan of what we're gonna do.

(upbeat funk music) (gun firing) - [Will] It's called Civic Alert.

- [Brian] If there was a gunshot happening, that information gets pushed out to the users, they then would have the option to call that into APD.

(indistinct) - I think I'm gonna take these back with us so we can use 'em for our test as well.

- [Person] You mean the...?

- So the first step was, first of all, what can we physically do to make the actual...?

I mean, the hands-on tangible technology affordable?

(upbeat percussive music) The ones that are out there are extraordinarily expensive, I mean, we're talking, like, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

(cash register ringing) - We're a cash-strapped neighborhood association.

I had thought there must be, like, some cheap and easy way of doing this with cell phones.

(upbeat percussive music) - It's computer chips inside of a box.

Each of these boxes has four microphones inside of it, it has a GPS chip and it has a cellular modem.

What it's doing is it is just constantly listening exclusively for sounds that are... it's called an impulsive event, like a gunshot, a firework, a car backfiring, a balloon popping, clapping, anything that just has a really sharp, kind of immediate onset.

It has been trained to understand what the difference between a gunshot and a car backfire is, for instance.

So once it has determined that there is a gunshot, it will send the timestamp as well as its location, the location of the sensor, to a server.

It can take all of those different timestamps and figure out where the shooter was.

At that point, it will create what's called an incident alert, but that's pretty much it in a nutshell.

(faint speaking) - There's still so many unknowns.

What if my neighbor wants to have one and I don't wanna have one?

And then, you have rental properties and who decides that?

(faint speaking) Once you start asking all these questions, you realize there's a lot more layers to it all.

(relaxed string music) We have a very heterogeneous neighborhood.

These are often the communities that are the most impacted by illegal gunfire as well.

Historically, I think trust has been pretty good with APD, but now, we see with APD being forced to coordinate more with ICE, there's more concerns.

- We have a lot of people in our community who come from mixed-status families, so once you receive this information, what's gonna happen once somebody calls?

- They can just tell us where the gunshot detection system detected the gunfire, and that is it and that's where it ends, and if they choose to remain anonymous and have all these conversations where they... - [Brian] We wanted this to be a community-based system that was initiated by residents.

(faint speaking) - One of our initial really big goals was not integrating directly with law enforcement.

- While there's still reflections going on.

- The great thing was APD also agreed, they were like, "We don't want this integrated into our system right now," they were interested in actually getting increased call volume.

(upbeat percussive music) If there is a detection that's heard by the system... - [Brian] That information gets pushed out to the users.

- So then they can choose to either call the police with that information, or ignore it, or do whatever it is that they want to do.

- When you do get an alert, you would be given a kind of script of like, you know, these are the things that APD's probably going to ask you.

- So it's gonna be, "This is what they're going to ask you and here is the answer," even if their... English isn't their first language, it's kind of a very easy call-and-response, "This is what you're gonna ask, this is what you're gonna say," but it's giving them the control over how much police presence they want in their neighborhood, essentially.

(faint speaking) - What's the last name?

- [Person] Johnson.

- Johnson.

(faint speaking) - This system, it was designed with privacy and community at the forefront, and at the end of the day, you decide whether or not you wanna act upon an alert.

I believe that the implementation of the system in the community is going to be a benefit to everyone.

(faint speaking)