School District Tests AI-Enabled Gun Detection Tech to Thwart Potential Mass Shooters
In a world where the eyes of security cameras see more than any human, some schools are turning to artificial intelligence to head off potential school shootings.
In Ocean City, New Jersey, the city’s boardwalk and the Ocean City School District are working with ZeroEyes to get the earliest possible warning when there is a gun in the vicinity of potential victims.
“I don’t think anybody should question or be fearful of an artificial intelligence program that’s going to identify an immediate imminent threat of someone being shot or killed. You can’t put a price tag on saving a life,” Ocean City Police Chief Jay Prettyman said, according to ABC.
The report said that school superintendent Scott McCartney’s greatest fear is to have a school shooting take place in the schools he oversees.
“I would do everything I could do to keep my own children safe, and in the role of superintendent, it’s that much greater responsibility,” he said.
The system, which works in combination with humans who evaluate the system’s alerts, is also a deterrent, Prettyman added.
“If we can put something in the place that we can advertise about — that can scare people from coming to Ocean City and coming to any of our schools, and we can push evil off to another day — that’s what I think is our responsibility to do for our kids every day,” Prettyman said.
“I’m 100 percent confident that we are going to have such a fast response compared to not having this system,” Prettyman said, adding that the system “is going to increase the opportunity of our officers to get into that building as quickly as possible and save lives.”
The system works through the school’s video cameras to scan for objects that appear to be guns. If a possible gun is detected, an image is sent to the analysts at ZeroEyes, who are veterans or former members of law enforcement. If they think the threat is real, they notify school and local law enforcement authorities.
The company says the entire process takes about 30 seconds.
“Fifteen times more people die from gun violence in a given year than they do from fires in a building, but every building you walk into is going to have a smoke detector fire suppression system,” ZeroEyes CEO and co-founder Michael Lahiff said. “It’s only a matter of time. We’re going to have proactive solutions out there for active shooters, mass shootings, gun violence. And ZeroEyes is going to set the bar for that standard.”
John Cohen, a former acting undersecretary for Intelligence at the Department of Homeland Security said the system cannot be perfect because data is never perfect.
“If the data coming into the computer that’s using artificial intelligence is flawed or incomplete, the judgments and the analysis created by the computer will be flawed or incomplete as well,” he said.
“If it works right, it can help save lives. If it doesn’t work right, if it creates a lot of false positives. It could actually be a distraction to response efforts and that can mean more lives lost,” he said.
Lahiff said the company has not yet sent out a false alarm. He also noted that the system focuses on one thing and one thing only — objects shaped like guns.
.”We’re not we’re not collecting biometric data on people,” Lahiff said. “We’re not collecting faces or names or anything like that. It’s just looking for an object, looking for a gun.”
Lahiff and Cohen both said an alert requires follow-up.
“Even under the best of circumstances, an artificial intelligence enabled early detection system will only save lives when it’s part of a multi-layered security capability,” Cohen said.
“Schools still need to have active shooter plans in place. There still needs to be physical security in place that prevents or impedes an attacker from gaining access. You’re still going to have to have protocols in place to protect potential victims inside the location,” he said.
Prettyman said he will take every edge he can get.
“You can’t stop evil. You have to do the best you can to prevent where it’s going to happen and be prepared to respond once it does,” he said.
Officials of ZeroEyes, which lists the Air Force as one of its satisfied customers, said they want to use the information that already exists in a pro-active way.
“That’s why we founded ZeroEyes, to get an image of that gun and that shooter to the right people, so they can get there before shots fired and know what they’re getting into,” co-founder Sam Alaimo said, according to WPIX-TV. “That’s half the problem. First responders don’t know what they’re getting into. They get conflicting information in the fog of war.”
“Depending on what source you get, be it the FBI or Secret Service or whatever, they say anywhere from two to 30 minutes the gun is exposed,” Alaimo said. “That is a significant amount of time. If you look at Parkland, the El Paso Walmart shooting, Uvalde, that gun is exposed for multiple cameras before the shot is fired,” he said.
Former Navy SEAL Rob Huberty, a co-founder and the current chief operating officer of ZeroEyes said the company was formed in response to a tragedy, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
“We started this company after Parkland,” he said, referring to the deadly Florida school shooting.
“It was heartbreaking to see that the police were looking at video cameras that were rewound 20 minutes,” Huberty said. “It was heartbreaking to see that he was walking around with a gun and could have been caught had somebody been looking at [the cameras].”
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