Leon County Public Schools recently renewed its contract to use AI gun detection software on its cameras.
Sam Alaimo of ZeroEyes, the company contracted with the school system, told WFSU the technology helps look for signs of a firearm, then it alerts the company’s employees who verify it.
“The algorithm says, I think it's a gun. The human manually dispatches it. You get it. So in the real world, we do. This in about three to five seconds,” he said.
The employees, who are largely former law enforcement and military personnel, review stills taken by the AI and decide whether to dispatch law enforcement. The footage does not constantly run.
“We don't want to invade privacy. We're veterans or patriots. We don't do facial recognition. We cannot store biometric data, and it's way easier to do that without streaming live feed,” Alaimo said. “There's also a practical application. When it comes down to scalability, we don't need to channel all that data in.”
He sayid his company trains the Artificial intelligence program to lean on the side of giving more false positives to then be verified by staff, so they don’t miss a potential gun.
“If it's not actually a gun, if it just looks perfectly like a gun, a lot of times, people will wear a shirt, like a white shirt with a black Uzi on it, or something. So, we're going to pick that up, because it looks like a gun, and we should pick it up. That's just a false positive. We know it's not real because our human verifies it, but if it's real, we hit dispatch,” he said.
The use of AI for gun detection has been a topic of discussion in recent years by Florida lawmakers. A proposal last year would have limited its use to buildings like schools and government buildings but prohibit the technology from being used by the government on public cameras. Alaimo thinks the tech’s continued development and use is a vital tool in preventing gun deaths.
“When I frame it this way, do you or do you not want to know when there's an AK-47 in front of elementary school? No one's gonna say, I don't want to know. It's that simple. If they're, if they're, if they're actually dedicated to stopping mass shootings and gun violence. This is actual, workable, provable technology that they could deploy immediately,” he said.
ZeroEyes has clients in 42 states.