CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Long before Uvalde, the gaps in school campus security were causing concern for both teachers and parents.
3NEWS learned Corpus Christi schools have been using artificial intelligence to beef up security for years.
CCISD's Police Chief Kirby Warnke told 3NEWS about a program installed several years ago called Zeroeyes.
"Last year we got swat'ed eight times," Warnke said. "The AI tells us it's an armed person. A person looks at it and realizes it's us. It's armed response addressing what we've come to learn was a false 9-1-1 call."
Zeroeyes software helps schools detect problems through existing video surveillance cameras. It will detect people carrying firearms and then automatically alert on campus police and even city police if a definite threat is detected.
"We're fortunate that it hasn't spotted an armed person who's not supposed to be there, but what it has done is it was picking up kids with Air Softs," Warnke said.
Down the road, AI may be able to determine a threat before anything happens scanning police records and social media but Zeroeyes decided to specialize.
"I met the other founders in SEAL teams in 2009, we're patriots," Zeroeyes co-founder Sam Alaimo said. "When we founded the company we debated, 'Do we want to get into gun detection and also facial detection, also mass notification, also data analysis,' and the answer was no. Because if we did that we'd be a "B" across the board instead of an "A" plus at one thing which is gun detection."
Warnke said the state helped partially fund the addition of 33 more officers to make sure there is armed security at every campus in the district.
"So CCISD is very, very ahead of the curve when it comes to being proactive to keep kids safe," he said
Warnke added with more officers, new vestibules, surveillance and detectors, the district is well on the way to better security all around.
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