New Mexico city deploys ZeroEyes gun-detection solution

After seeing ZeroEyes gun-detection solution implemented successfully in local schools, the city of Hobbs, N.M., recently announced that it has deployed the ZeroEyes technology throughout the municipality, according to a city official.

“Right now, we have it deployed through roughly 70 various cameras throughout the city,” Brendan Ingley, a sergeant in the city of Hobbs’ real-time crime center, said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.

“Pretty much all of our cameras [located at] city buildings, city intersections or city parks.”

Ingley said city officials became interested in deploying ZeroEyes throughout the city after seeing it used successfully by the local school district. The ZeroEyes solution is a significant improvement when compared to the city’s former gunshot-detection service, which is no longer used, he said.

“This is far more valuable,” Ingley said. “This has really been accurate.”

Sam Alaimo, ZeroEyes co-founder and chief revenue officer, said that level of accuracy is by design. Although ZeroEyes uses artificial intelligence (AI) to flag video of potential guns being brought within the range of a camera, this initial detection always is reviewed by a qualified member of ZeroEyes’ in-house monitoring team before an alert is sent to a client, he said.

“AI isn’t as advanced as people seem to think it is,” Alaimo said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “You still need a human in the loop. We get detections every single day. A lot of them are real. A lot of them are not real. We want to filter out the non-real ones, so our clients don’t get them.

“They will not get an alert until the human manually verifies … that the image is, in fact, a gun. We never want to send a false positive to a client and get them spun up for nothing. This is too important. You want this to be the real thing when it happens.”

When an actual gun is detected in a potentially dangerous situation, ZeroEyes acts quickly to deliver an alert to the appropriate parties—sometimes within seconds of the gun being detected, according to Alaimo.

“In short order, we get our first alert,” he said. “A human verifies it and dispatches it, and only then does the client get that alert—with a bouncing icon—telling them what camera it was on.

“That image can then be sent to their local on-site security and to local law enforcement. That means local law-enforcement and security officers are able to walk into that location knowing what the shooter looks like, how many guns they have, the type of weapons systems they have, the exact location and the exact time.”

If ZeroEyes personnel determines that the device initially flagged by artificial intelligence is not a dangerous weapon—for instance, a realistic-looking toy gun carried as part of a Halloween costume—the client is given an informal call about the situation, Alaimo said. This type of information can be valuable, as it allows law enforcement or security to proactively diffuse a potentially precarious scenario that could be created if eyewitnesses in the area report or take actions based on the assumption that an actual gun in the vicinity, he said.

ZeroEyes was focused on school safety, with the company starting in 2018, in the wake of the tragic school shooting in Parkland, Fla. Alaimo said. The company planned to enter the market in 2020, but those plans were undermined by widespread school shutdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.

This situation caused ZeroEyes to explore verticals beyond education for its gun-detection solution, Alaimo. As a result, ZeroEyes is deployed in 35 states and serves three main verticals—military, commercial and education—which has helped the company grow and improve its offerings, he said.

“We’re finding that what makes us good in education make us better in commercial and vice versa,” Alaimo said. “The same goes with government—we get better across the board.

“It’s been an intense ride. America has a problem, and we’re doing everything we can, with a proactive solution, to do something about it.”