OPINION: School safety – it’s time to accelerate the adoption of security tech

We must leverage existing technologies like social media monitoring, gunshot and weapons detection, and real-time watchlist alerting. We owe it to our children.

The recent news of the Dallas elementary school shooting absolutely gutted me. It’s a tragic and incomprehensible loss of life.

A question I hear being asked again and again – could technology have made a difference? From my experience, modern technologies can help schools mitigate some of the damage and provide an early warning to law enforcement so they can mount a faster and more effective response.

Early warning technologies

The fact is technologies exist – and are in production – that can provide an additional safety net and potentially slow a would-be attacker and at least give law enforcement a few more moments of notice to mount an effective response.

Naturally, people will argue for stronger gun controls and better mental health programs

Seconds are precious. And they’re being lost because schools often don’t have the requisite early warning technologies to trigger the alarm. Naturally, people will argue for stronger gun controls and better mental health programs. They’re absolutely needed, but schools and law enforcement need real-world tactical solutions that exploit the power of today’s technologies.

Real-world tactical solutions

• Social media monitoring: The shooter apparently made three social media posts, about 30 minutes before the shooting. The FBI and local police can monitor public social media posts in real-time to identify threats and respond quickly.
• Gunshot detection: Gunshot detection systems use acoustic sensing technology to identify, discriminate, and report gunshots to the police within seconds of the shot being fired. A gunshot detection system usually involves a number of sensors to detect the sound of a gunshot and transmitters to send a message to the police dispatch center.
• Weapons detection: Weapon detection systems use high-performance object detection algorithms using deep neural networks. These AI algorithms work with your existing video surveillance systems to automatically detect automatic knives, guns, and firearms using deep learning models.
• Watchlist alerting: Many schools in the U.S. have lists of known security threats. This often includes ex-students, parents, and faculty who were prone to violence in the past and sexual predators who live in the immediate vicinity. Watchlist alerting works with a school’s video surveillance system to identify persons of interest (POI) through both face and attribute recognition in real-time and sends instant alerts instantly when a POI approaches school property.

Watchlist alerting solution

If someone is not watching that camera at that time - the camera is almost worthless"

After a tragic event on one of their campuses, a public-school district in Santa Fe, Texas invested in a watchlist alerting solution, an AI-based face recognition security solution to create a safer environment for the thousands of students, teachers, and staff who populate their schools and facilities. This was in 2019. According to Kip Robins who was then the Director Technology at the Santa FE ISD: “We have almost 700 cameras throughout the district, but if someone is not watching that camera at that time - the camera is almost worthless.”

• Metal Detectors: Once dismissed as something only needed for schools in areas with a high crime rate, many schools across the U.S. are now considering the use of metal detectors. It should be obvious by now that living in a ‘nice neighbourhood’ is not an insurance policy against school shootings. They can strike any community - large or small, rural or suburban.

Use of metal detectors

To be clear, there is no single technology that will prevent this type of tragedy. But, let’s act now and at least have the technologies in place to help expedite a better response – while we simultaneously debate the deeper questions about the nature of education, mental health and guns in American society. We owe it to our children.

Avi Golan is CEO of Oosto, a Vision AI pioneer enabling organisations to better protect their students, customers and employees by identifying security and safety threats in real-time.