Ten people were killed and three injured when a gunman opened fire at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store in 2022.
“It just brought everything home in a horrific, real sense,” said Brian Graham, superintendent of the Grand Island School District — which is just a 10 minute drive from Buffalo.
Graham used to live in the city with his wife and their four kids. Staff at the district went to the same store that became a mass shooting scene.
He wanted to make sure his schools were safe from mass shooters, so he began researching increased security measures.
That’s when he came across ZeroEyes, a software company promising to help prevent mass shootings and gun violence.
ZeroEyes uses AI software and existing security cameras to search for guns. When a gun is detected, the software sends a screenshot of the security feed to an employee working at ZeroEyes. The employee then determines if it is a real firearm and, if it is, alerts police and staff at the facility.
It was exactly the solution Graham sought.
“We need to make sure that families and students know that during the school day and outside of the school day, this is a gun-free school,” he said.
ZeroEyes is now expanding in Kansas after state lawmakers set aside $10 million to help school districts pay for the program. But not every lawmaker thinks the program works.
Concerns about false alarms
Sen. Virgil Peck, a Havana Republican, said he’s seen news reports of false alarms.
“I don’t believe that the AI software is advanced enough to where it is reliable,” Peck said.
In Clute, Texas, the AI system falsely identified a gun at school. The ZeroEyes staff member who received that photo also identified the shadowy blob on screen as a gun and alerted district staff. The school was locked down and children were hiding.
“(My daughter) was scared,” a parent told NBC News in San Antonio. “Friends were scared. Family was scared. Everybody was scared.”
JT Wilkins, the head of sales at ZeroEyes, said false alarms do happen, but the company would rather err on the side of caution. He said a faster response time saves lives.
It isn’t clear how common false alerts are. ZeroEyes said it isn’t a number “that we put out there.”
That concerns Peck. He said it’s suspicious the company can’t say how often the system and its staff mess up.
“I would expect them to have that number and just not be willing to share,” he said. “I have nothing (that) can prove that, but that’s a suspicion of mine.”
Graham, the New York superintendent, is sold on ZeroEyes.
“First off, it works,” he said. “Secondly, it works fast.”
Graham’s district has had ZeroEyes for three years and just signed another three-year contract. There hasn’t been a school shooter, but there have been people who brought toy guns on campus. The system spotted them and ZeroEyes staff identified them as fake weapons.
The system has detected real guns on school resource officers, which included spotting a black gun that was in front of a black jacket. Graham said he’s very impressed with how well the technology works.
Wilkins said ZeroEyes would have helped during the 2019 El Paso, Texas, mass shooting at Walmart and the 2018 Parkland, Florida, mass shooting. In El Paso, the gunman stood in the parking lot with their weapon out for minutes putting on body armor. In Parkland, the shooter took the gun out in a stairwell where a camera spotted it.
But the AI software wouldn’t help in every case. Someone needs to be holding the gun by a camera for an alert to ping. Not every shooting has the weapon out for minutes at a time.
The 2017 Las Vegas mass shooter carried his weapons into his hotel room via suitcase. The 2017 Sutherland Springs, Texas, mass shooter was spotted wearing tactical gear before driving to a church, getting out of his car and firing before he even got inside.
It is possible a camera could have spotted those gunmen, but it isn’t clear if any camera would have caught the weapons before shots were fired.
Safety alternatives for Kansas schools
Ken Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, doesn’t think AI is the future of mass shooting prevention. He said districts should be spending money on the human side of gun violence — that means social, emotional and mental health support.
Trump said there are lawsuits after individual or mass shootings. Those lawsuits are mostly about human failures, not technology failures. One example is Uvalde, Texas, when police waited outside the classroom for about an hour while the shooter killed students and teachers.
Trump said districts are spending money on high-tech systems so they can show parents and students they are trying to make things safer, but that doesn’t mean basic security practices are in place.
“School leaders need to make sure that they’re mastering the fundamentals and passing school safety kindergarten before they try to jump for Ph.D. solutions,” he said.
Trump’s also concerned about limited school budgets being spent on flashy items.
This $10 million in funding comes as the state’s budget is lean. Future projections say Kansas will be $700 million short in 2029, and state lawmakers were slashing spending throughout the recent legislative session. But the funding for tech security systems survived budget cuts because some lawmakers see it as vital to school safety.
Lawmakers have tried before to fund the program, but it was vetoed by the governor. Gov. Laura Kelly was previously concerned that the requirements for the funding were so specific that ZeroEyes would be the only company that would qualify.
Kelly didn’t veto the funding this year because there is a competitive bidding process. Some other lawmakers aren’t convinced and are still worried the state set aside $10 million with no real competition for taxpayer dollars.
Rep. Kristey Williams, an Augusta Republican, said no school has to spend money on technology, and if schools don’t use it, the funds don’t have to be spent.
She said this technology is an effective way to keep children safe.
“Generally in government, we’re usually behind in technology,” she said. “This is us trying to be proactive and thinking forward.”
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
