With several mass shootings logged in the U.S. early this year and another tragic one that unfolded this week in Nashville, the debate over how to safeguard schools, healthcare facilities, employers and other public places has never been a more urgent for the security industry.
The advancement of artificial intelligence and evolution of powerful surveillance camera software means cameras are no longer limited to forensic investigation of ‘what happened’ but becoming a centerpiece of preventative safety. And a large part of keeping public places safe isn’t just detecting threats, but getting law enforcement on the way quickly and helping workers get to safety immediately.
SecurityInfoWatch.com (SIW) sat down with Mark Franken, vice president of marketing at Omnilert, to discuss these trends and how the company is working to provide solutions.
SIW: How did your company get started and how has it evolved?
Franken: The roots of the company go back to the early 2000s. Our co-founders, Ara Bagdasarian and Nick Gustavsson, were moved by the press they’d seen about gun violence on campuses, and text messaging was getting popular at the time. They felt there was an opportunity to inform people in a much more broad and quick way about potential emerging issues.
Franken: Where the company started was just in mass texting, but over time the capabilities grew. With emergencies on a school or corporate campus, how do we get information back to authorities? So investments were made to get intelligence back in a way that is useful and easily digestible by small teams.
With the prevalence of gun violence growing around 2018, that’s when our investment in AI started to happen. There was dormant technology sitting everywhere. There are 70 million cameras in the world and they should be used for more than forensics. AI can be used to look for a gun threat, quickly alert people and get them out of harm’s way to a safe area.
SIW: In what verticals are you seeing the most interest for this technology?
Franken: K-12 and higher education is very big, as well as hospitals in the last year or two. People don’t recognize the amount of violence that happens in hospitals and what our healthcare professionals must put up with.
And I think you’ll hear more about retail. A lot of their initial interest is in their distribution network. Their distribution centers are super-porous environments. You can't really add a lot of security when you’ve got trucks coming in and out. Exterior perimeter monitoring will also be a major growth area. You can't put metal detectors outside in your parking lots and sidewalks. And I believe about 40% of school shootings have started outside with somebody brandishing a weapon and walking around outside -- sometimes for a discernible amount of time.
SIW: What kind of trends are you seeing in the threat detection market right now?
Franken: I think 2023 will be really big for visual detection. You’re already seeing more public deployments, and people talking more openly about the technology and how they’re using it. You’re going to see more deployments and a change in the sheer size of deployments. I think we’re at an inflection point for that technology to grow in a more meaningful way.
And it’s not just about the detection, but how quickly you can activate other security systems, or notify everybody on premise or those off site that you don’t want to come in because there’s an active shooter.
SIW: What kind of message are you driving home about your technology at ISC West?
Franken: Really it’s just letting people experience the technology.
We created an Omnilert gun detection self-demonstration using a webcam. Using a webcam on their laptop at home or in a private space – with a real-looking or toy gun or a real gun – people can experience how the technology works. We will have this demonstration technology at the show.
SIW: What kind of dialogue are you seeing, and potential initiatives are being discussed, with the ZeroNow alliance? (Editor’s note: ZeroNow is an industry group formed in 2021 to drive ideas, innovation and investment to advance school safety.)
Franken: The first couple years was really focused on the formation of the alliance and pulling the different technology players together. But we’re hearing from the education community a real desire for national standards when it comes to school safety. There’s a lot of different groups and publishing different information, but if there were more standards that would be a big help for them.
A big initiative being developed for this year is Path to Zero – a toolkit that provides a path for schools to move forward in a proper way to improve safety. Over 100 or so different safety experts in the ZeroNow community collaborated to talk about security and funding, and how to connect schools together with different resources into this easily digestible, easy to understand framework.
SIW: What other directions might Omnilert take this year as a company?
Franken: One theme is enterprise capabilities. Most people have focused on, ‘Let's see the box, let's see the detection of the gun on the video.’ But also important is the management and deployment of the technology, such as working with hundreds of buildings in a large school district. There will be more conversation around that as more people get exposed to the technology and see the potential for easy scaling and deployment. They’re getting out of the ‘Let’s try a small pilot implementation’ and doing large-scale deployments.
