The City of Ammon just took first place in the National Institute of Justice’s (NIJ) Ultra-High Speed Apps: Using Current Technology to Improve Criminal Justice Operations Challenge with the “School Emergency Screencast Application”.
The challenge encourages software developers and public safety professionals to utilize public domain data and ultra-high speed systems to create applications to improve criminal justice and public safety operations. Ammon’s application does just that.
Utilizing gunshot detection hardware and a school’s existing camera system, the application reports gunshot fire and provides live-video and geospatial information to dispatch and first responders. Greg Warner, county director of emergency communications, described how this application will change the response to a shooting emergency:
“We’re going from no intelligence to almost total intelligence … The ability to strategize when approaching a situation like that, and keep people safe, is an exponential change.”
The City of Ammon will share the $75,000 prize money with its public partners, such as the Bonneville Joint School District 93 and the Bonneville County Sheriff’s Office.
This application would not have been possible without the City of Ammon’s municipal network which the Bonneville Joint School District recently joined after the state education network went dark. The city built the network incrementally over a few years and operates it as open access to encourage competition. For more information on Ammon’s unique approach to high-speed Internet, check out Community Broadband Bits Episode 86.
The video below provides an example of the application in action.
This article is apart of MuniNetworks. The original piece can be found here
