MARIETTA, Ga. — School violence is a national and local problem that the Marietta City School District says it is trying to prevent within its own district through a layered approach.
On Tuesday, school board members unanimously signed off on the purchase of an Artificial Intelligence Weapons Detection System.
Channel 2 Cobb County Bureau Chief Michele Newell spoke with the School Safety and Emergency Management Specialist about how it will help to keep students safe.
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“Instead of having a person monitoring the camera 24/7 computer software is doing it in real time,” said Wallace.
The computer software will overlay the districts existing cameras.
“If you look at the old school movies where you have that security guard looking at a bank of 50 cameras, it’s basically 50 security guards looking at that camera in real time,” said Wallace.
“If someone walks to the front doors of the building and you have an exterior camera with this software on it and they have a visible weapon, within one or two seconds that alert will go straight to our police officers in the building. In real time they are going to get information that someone is walking into the building with a weapon. They will get an alert on their phone with an image of what that alert is so it might be someone standing there with a gun,” said Wallace.
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Wallace said the new system will also minimize response times to dangerous situations.
“That lag time of someone seeing it to calling 911 to the 911 dispatcher getting it to officers its cutting that in half. This is a direct information from that camera straight to the officers so the response time in theory with this product is to reduce the response time to any emergency situation in the building,” said Wallace.
The vendor the district is using is Alliance, but the actual software filtering system is called Omnilert.
“Students will not feel any type of change. This will not affect their day to day this will not affect anything in the school building. We hope to have it implemented by the end of spring,” said Wallace.
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