Today, he said students are often told two different things during a school shooting: to run or to hide. “Whatever these kids are doing to improve (technology like) ShotSpotter is a good thing.”ĭavid Riedman, the founder of the K-12 Shooting Database, agrees the impact of SIREN - if it works as intended - could be immense. Adam Lobsinger, the public information officer for the San Francisco Police Department. “Anything we can do to better improve our response time, get to a victim faster, and make the public safer, we’re 100% on board with,” said Sgt. The average school shooting lasts 12.5 minutes, while the average time it takes police to arrive is around 18 minutes, according to the National Sheriffs’ Association. The timing of that response, the SIREN team said, is essential. They then verify that sound and alert law enforcement within 60 seconds. Once a gunshot sounds, the sensors can triangulate its location and send the recording to a team of human experts. The technology works through a set of acoustic sensors on streetlights or telephone poles, which are connected virtually to a cloud-based platform. Police across the Bay Area have had success with ShotSpotter, a similar device that’s been on the market for decades. But we can’t do any of that if we don’t know what’s going on.” “What we learn in school is to run, hide and defend. “In situations like this, miscommunication can be really dangerous,” said Srivastava. Within five seconds, SIREN can send a map of the school - and the location of the shot - through an SMS message to all students, teachers, staff and the local police department. It’s equipped with a microphone and a computer program trained to identify a gunshot, and with multiple devices located across a school, it can pinpoint exactly where a shot is coming from. Ultimately, they came up with SIREN, a 3-by-6-inch device that screws onto ceilings like a smoke detector. The four had met through hackathons and coding camps, and in the past, had bonded over being women in technology. Just months after Uvalde, Wang, Srivastava and two other juniors, Santa Clara High School’s Caitlin Nguyen, and Mission San Jose High School’s Audrey Wang, started brainstorming ways to decrease police response time and increase the information shared with students, teachers, parents and school staff who are under attack. “It seems like this nightmare will never stop for us.” “Right now, it’s terrifying to be a student in America,” said Wang. But as students, this isn’t something we can just choose to ignore,” said Swarnya Srivastava, a rising senior at Monta Vista High School in Cupertino, and member of the SIREN team. “It’s sad that we felt like we had to make this device. This summer, she and three friends will be refining SIREN, an artificial intelligence device they’ve trained to detect gunshots and instantly communicate with all students, staff members and teachers at an affected school, along with the police department. “We didn’t really know what was going on, but we knew the teachers were scared out of their minds.”Īfter 10 years of waiting for things to change, Wang - a rising senior at San Jose’s Gunderson High - decided to take things into her own hands. Wang didn’t understand what was going on, but when they finally walked outside, her entire family was waiting - and they looked terrified. They were barricaded in a Los Gatos classroom for four hours until police found the man who’d run across their campus with a gun. She remembers vividly her teacher’s panicked face, and her urgent voice telling Rebecca and her classmates to keep quiet, hide behind their desks and stay calm. Rebecca Wang was just 7 years old the first time it happened.
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