Police responded to the Florida middle school minutes after the alert arrived last week: Security cameras had detected a man in the building, dressed in camouflage with a “suspected weapon pointed down the hallway, being held in the position of a shouldered rifle.” The Oviedo school went into lockdown. An officer searched classrooms but couldn’t find the person or hear any commotion, according to a police report.
Then dispatchers added another detail. Upon closer review of the image flagged to police, they told the officer, the suspected rifle might have been a band instrument.
The officer went to where students were hiding in the band room. He found the culprit — a student wearing a military costume for a themed dress-up day — and the “suspected weapon”: a clarinet.
The gaffe occurred because an artificial-intelligence-powered surveillance system used by Lawton Chiles Middle School mistakenly flagged the clarinet as a weapon, according to ZeroEyes, the security company that runs the system and contracts with Lawton Chiles’s school district.
Like a growing number of school districts across the country, Seminole County Public Schools has turned to AI-powered surveillance to bolster campus security. ZeroEyes sells a threat-detection system that scans video surveillance footage for signs of weapons or contraband and alerts law enforcement when they are spotted. The appetite for such systems has grown in an era of frequent, high-profile school shootings — such as the attack at Brown University on Saturday that killed two students and injured nine.
Some school safety and privacy experts said the recent incident at the Florida middle school is part of a trend in which threat detection systems used by schools misfire, putting students under undue suspicion and stress.
“These are unproven technologies that are marketed as providing a lot of certainty and security,” said David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database. Riedman was employed by ZeroEyes as a director of industry research in September 2023, and his employment ended in termination that year, according to ZeroEyes and Riedman.
ZeroEyes said that trained employees review alerts before they are sent and that its software can make a lifesaving difference in averting mass shootings by alerting law enforcement to weapons on campus within seconds. At Lawton Chiles, the student flagged by ZeroEyes was holding his musical instrument like a rifle, co-founder Sam Alaimo told The Washington Post.
“We don’t think we made an error, nor does the school,” Alaimo said. “That was better to dispatch [police] than not dispatch.”
Seminole County Public Schools declined to comment on Tuesday’s incident, but it provided a copy of the letter it sent to parents of Lawton Chiles students after the incident.
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