Early Intervention: Leveraging Visual AI to Prevent Active Shootings

Webinar Summary

Active shootings in schools are on the rise. Over 348,000 students have been exposed to gun incidents since Columbine, with 1,924 school shooting incidents since 1970, growing year over year. Since 2000, there have been 783 shootings with deaths or injuries at elementary and secondary schools. The FBI states that an active shooter spends 2 to 20 minutes staging for the event. These statistics are shocking and disheartening, given this time to detect and stop an event.

The problem is that current detection methods are reactive and have limited scalability. Gunshot detectors, alarms, and current video camera technology identify active shooting events after they have started. Current camera systems also require constant vigilance, with human attention spans notoriously limited.

Visual AI is a technology that proactively detects threats, automatically alerting the proper authorities and helping to stop active shootings before they start. Visual AI uses a combination of computer vision, deep learning technology, and existing camera systems to detect and stop active shooter events proactively.

Further, visual AI systems can detect suspicious behaviors such as loitering, unidentified vehicles, and off-hours activities, such as a car or person entering the perimeter during the school day. This gives administrators and school resource officers the time to investigate the situation before a weapon is detected. Visual AI can also track specific individuals throughout a campus, tracking movements from camera to camera.

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Learn from SparkCognition how AI is transforming school safety and helping ensure our students, teachers, and administrators can get back to focusing on education.