Cardinal News: Then & Now takes a look back at the stories we brought you over the last 12 months. Through the end of the year, we’re sharing updates on some of the people and issues that made news in 2025. This installment: the fate of police surveillance technology in Martinsville.
A little over a year after incorporating additional surveillance technology throughout the city, Martinsville’s Police Department is in the process of scaling it back.
Police Chief Chad Rhoads said the network of listening devices that the city installed near the beginning of the year has not yielded the kinds of results his department was expecting. The department began phasing out individual devices in October with plans to fully phase out the entire system around January.
“The gunshot detection system, it does detect the gunshots but it’s not to the level that we would hope it to be,” Rhoads said. “It didn’t pick up gunshots in the homes where we knew gunshots had taken place, inside of residences, they didn’t pick those up.”
Rhoads described incidents where a neighbor’s Ring doorbell would pick up the sound of multiple shots while a nearby sensor only picked up a fraction of them.
The gunshot detection system consisted of 140 sensors placed around the city. The system uses three sensors to triangulate the location of sounds that are similar to gunfire. The system then sends the location to an officer, warning of a suspected crime.
Rhoads explained that the technology is tuned for a specific sound and doesn’t pick up things like a nearby conversation.
“Those are gunshot detectors,” he said. “They don’t really listen to anything; they just detect the sharp noise of gunshots.”
The technology came from Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based tech firm. Martinsville police paid $80,000 in grant funding received from Operation Ceasefire Virginia, a program from the attorney general’s office.
The devices are advertised to pick up gunfire while filtering other noises. Rhoads said this wasn’t always the case.
“Originally we had thought it was going to be very, very accurate and it would be able to push the message out to our officers and the officers would be able to respond to the areas of the gunshots with a high degree of accuracy,” Rhoads said. “It’s just fallen a little bit short as far as its accuracy and its ability to pick up gunshots.”
Throughout much of the year, Martinsville police experimented with the placement of sensors to find the optimal layout.
Rob Fincher, who was police chief when the sensors first were deployed, described the department’s use of them as an “experiment.” After a year, Rhoads said he believes that his department would be better served without them.
The listening devices were one among a handful of technologies the department has implemented in recent years. Prior to the listening devices, Martinsville police set up automatic license readers and cameras in certain intersections. Rhoads said those two systems left a more favorable impression and are still being used.
“The rest of our Flock equipment, we’re really happy with,” Rhoads said. “They are very effective.”
Rhoads described them as the “contrast” to the gunshot detectors.
“They are very accurate,” Rhoads said. “They have helped us return missing persons, they have helped us recover stolen vehicles.”
All three systems were designed by Flock. A Cardinal News investigation showed that smaller Virginia communities in particular have adopted Flock-designed systems in the past few years.
