Securing Schools
Eighteen-year-old Salvador Ramos murdered 21 people at a Texas elementary school last May. But might things have been different if a detection system had quickly alerted authorities to a man with a gun before the first shot? A group of former special forces has invented a new high-tech security solution for schools. Scott Thuman reports.
In America, mass shootings happen at an average rate of more than ten each week. Schools often the target, as in May, when 18-year-old Salvador Ramos killed 19 children and two adults in Uvalde County, Texas. As school districts struggle to identify the threat and stop it in time.
A team of former Navy Seals thinks they have a partial solution.
Sam Alaimo: I think we all found when we left the Seal Teams a lack of purpose, a lack of unity, and that’s what we sought to regain here with a noble mission.
Sam Alaimo is one of the founders of ZeroEyes; a Philadelphia company created with the sole mission of stopping shootings before they begin.
Sam Alaimo: What we’re trying to do is give first responders the situational awareness they need to react that much more quickly to a threat before a shot is even fired.
Because, they say, it is oddly common for shooters to pause and prepare with weapon in hand, sometimes for minutes before a single shot is fired.
It’s what happened in Parkland, Florida, when Nikolas Cruz killed 17 students, and at the Washington Navy Yard, when Aaron Alexis was seen on security cameras carrying a shotgun before he murdered 12.
The former elite warriors wondered, what if the second that gun is presented, it could trigger an alarm. So they developed an artificial intelligence system that’s sophisticated enough to recognize a weapon being carried, in just a couple of seconds.
