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."
How does AI help security officers detect guns on campus?
No school security office has enough eyes on all of its cameras at all times to spot a person with a gun. That's where ZeroEyes' concept comes into play.
"We utilize artificial intelligence overlayed onto the client's existing camera network and that AI software is asking one question 24/7/365: Is there something that appears to be a firearm that appears to be in frame of this image?" Wilkins said in a May 22 interview with The News-Journal.
The AI will detect anything that looks like a gun and send a message to the ZeroEyes' operations centers in Philadelphia and Honolulu. The former military and law enforcement officers who work there all have firearms training, Wilkins said.
"They know what a threat looks like. They know what a threat doesn't look like. They know what a gun looks like," he said.
If they determine the item is a gun, they will then dispatch that information to whoever the school district wants, such as law enforcement, school resource officers or principals within 3 to 5 seconds.
How frequently is ZeroEyes identifying gun threats?
Wilkins said the software detected a potential school shooting at an undisclosed district in Texas. ZeroEyes provided a frame from security footage showing several boys approaching the back of a school building with at least two guns detected, including a Glock and an AK-47.
ZeroEyes officials used their dispatch system to alert the school.
"They went into their security protocol procedures in order to react to that," Wilkins said. "It put the school district and the (school-resource officers) on a higher alert that there was a weapon there."
The incident ended without a shooting, he said.
Given its growing, nationwide scale, the company is "detecting the guns almost on a daily basis," Wilkins said.
AI helps locate guns, including airsoft, Nerf
Wilkins said the software's algorithm detects things that look like firearms, but it's a two-step process before the end user is notified. The trained human analysts can frequently spot non-lethal tools.
"We're looking for something that's actually going to fire a shot. As a part of that, we see things like airsoft guns that very clearly have an orange tip on them. We pick up things like Nerf guns or squirt guns on different campuses," Wilkins said.
For those types of identifications, ZeroEyes provides non-emergency communication with its clients, an email that says: "We do not perceive this to be a threat, but want to make you aware that this is there," he said.
"Our team is always going to err on the side of caution. We want to make sure that if we can't tell the difference, we're going to make the determination to dispatch that," Wilkins said. "If we can't very clearly see that this is not a threat, we want to let the client know that there is a potential threat on their campus."
The client will get an image, a location where it was spotted, and a timestamp.
Wilkins added that ZeroEyes cannot spot a weapon that's concealed or holstered, nor does it intend to infringe upon anyone's lawful right to carry a weapon.
"But when you pull that weapon out of a concealed position or out of a holstered position," he said, "you need to have a pretty good reason to do that."
Daytona Beach 1st city in Florida to use ZeroEyes software
Daytona Beach Police Chief Jakari Young said at the January 22 City Commission meeting the city intended to link the ZeroEyes software at key areas across the city, including the intersection of Seabreeze Boulevard and Grandview Avenue, City Hall, Main Street, the Bandshell, the corner of International Speedway and Bill France boulevards, Daytona Stadium and Joe Harris Park. At the time, he said the list was not final.
"If approved, we would be the first city in the State of Florida to implement this technology ... in this fashion," Young said.
City commissioners heard from a ZeroEyes vice president of sales, who called it "best-in-class" technology in stopping a threat.
"The whole goal of this is to give law enforcement time and situational awareness," Brett Handel said. "The majority of mass shootings and public shootings, almost 80% of the time, a gun is brandished underneath the camera anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 minutes before a first shot is fired, so ZeroEyes is not the end-all, be-all to every type of incident."
The proposal won unanimous commission support. The city's $15,000 annual price tag for 24 cameras was covered by a federal grant.
"Love this idea. I hope that we can find ways like this that we can be proactive instead of reactive," Commissioner Dannette Henry said.
Other commissioners, including Paula Reed and Mayor Derrick Henry, said the cameras would also be useful outside schools.
Young said the city has the ability to move the software to different cameras around the city, as well as add more cameras at a higher cost at a later time.
https://www.news-journalonline.com/story/news/education/campus/2025/05/23/volusia-schools-add-ai-based-gun-detection-software-to-secure-campuses/83791953007/
