Technology that allows police to immediately pinpoint the location and caliber of a gunshot is up and running in the Northwest part of Washington after police said it has helped solve shootings in Southeast part of the city.

The ShotSpotter system, which uses sensor to determine where shots are fired, was installed this month in the third police district. The expansion now allows the department to hear gunshots over an 11-square-mile area, or nearly a sixth of the city. City leaders asked for the expansion to combat gangs in Northwest D.C., including the Shaw and Columbia Heights neighborhoods.

D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier on Monday welcomed the $1.8 million expansion as one of the new initiatives the police are using to fight crime. She also mentioned the department’s new anonymous text-messaging tip line and the controversial checkpoints officers have been setting up periodically in the crime-ravaged Trinidad neighborhood in Northeast.

“ShotSpotter and the [checkpoints] are just two of the tools we use to gain important information about when and where crimes occur,” Lanier said.

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In September 2006, the District installed the technology in the roughest neighborhoods in Southeast Washington. Since then, ShotSpotter has helped police locate 13 homicide victims and 49 victims of assaults, police officials said.

The technology has been used in the investigation of nine arrests and could lead to America’s first murder trial in which ShotSpotter would play a prominent role, officials said.

The Metropolitan Police Department has plans to link its closed-circuit television cameras with its gunshot-location technology to get immediate pictures of an area where shots have been fired, police said.

The best example of the use of the system occurred shortly after it was installed in Anacostia. On Oct. 16, 2006, the ShotSpotter detected multiple gunshots at 2649 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. SE. When the call went over the air, a patrol officer was recorded as saying that she thought that she had heard gunshots but could not confirm, police said. She was immediately directed to the spot where the shots were detected and found a man, an apartment landscaper, suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. Police obtained a description of the suspect and stopped him as he was leaving the area two blocks away.

smccabe@dcexaminer.com