Florida School District Embraces AI Gun Detection

Artificial intelligence, as we currently have it, is an interesting technology, especially since it’s really just some pretty advanced if/then statements, more or less. It’s being embraced for a variety of purposes, some of which make sense and some of which doesn’t.

One area we’re seeing it used a lot is in gun detection efforts.

After all, if you can detect there’s a gun somewhere it’s not supposed to be, you can address it before anything terrible happens. That’s the theory, at least, though in practice, there are issues.

Yet schools in Volusia County, Florida, are embracing it.

Volusia County Schools has added a new measure of protection to its security system: artificial intelligence-driven gun-detection technology.

The School Board in March signed off on a $150,000, three-year contract with ZeroEyes Inc., a Pennsylvania-based contractor providing software that is promised to help detect guns using the existing security cameras at nearly 70 school campuses. Volusia schools followed in the footsteps of the Daytona Beach Police Department, which began using ZeroEyes software on 24 cameras earlier in the year.

J.T. Wilkins, ZeroEyes’ senior vice president of sales, said Volusia County joined approximately 10 other school districts in Florida to employ the software, which he said is in use in 43 states by a variety of entities.

News reports indicate that the Chicago Transit Authority, Modesto, California, police department, and Temple University in Philadelphia are among the organizations that use the gun-detection system.

Superintendent Carmen Balgobin said she wants Volusia County to be a “trailblazer” of school safety in Florida, and saw that Daytona Beach had been successful with its use of ZeroEyes.

“We conducted a thorough evaluation of the technology,” Balgobin said in a ZeroEyes news release. “We began piloting it in a few of our schools and quickly recognized the critical value it provides. We want our students to focus on learning, building friendships and preparing for their futures, rather than worrying about their safety.”

We’ve talked a bit about ZeroEyes in the past. They have a particular certification that no one else has, which they’ve been trying to lobby states to only allow AI gun detection companies with that certification, which strikes me as a little sleezy.

But that’s just me.

Still, while there have been significant problems with AI gun detection in the recent past, none of that has been with a ZeroEyes system, at least not yet.

Will that still hold? Honestly, who knows? School shootings aren’t nearly as common as the media would have you believe, so it’s entirely possible that there have been misses that just never showed up in news reports because nothing came of them. Or it might have detected every gun perfectly. It’s impossible to tell.

And, unfortunately, the only way to find out in a real-world environment is for someone to break the law and do something awful without being detected. Otherwise, there’s always going to be some degree of doubt.

If it works, it’s money well spent.

If it works but isn’t perfect, it’s probably still money well spent, if we’re being honest. No system is 100 percent perfect, so there’s really no point in trying to hold ZeroEyes up to some ridiculous standard.

Just so long as it stops giving anti-gunners reasons to go after our rights–no, they don’t need them, but I see no reason to help them make their cases, either–then I guess this will go in the “win” column.