Sarasota County Schools Selects Omnilert Gun Detect to Enhance Safety, Security Efforts
Omnilert, a provider of active shooter solutions, today announced that Sarasota County Schools in Florida is deploying its Omnilert Gun Detect system to monitor over 4,800 security cameras throughout the entire school district, representing the largest deployment of its kind in Florida aimed at thwarting the presence of weapons on school campuses. Omnilert Gun Detect is the most effective and complete AI visual gun detection system available today – providing 24/7 monitoring with a near-instant response at the first sight of a gun with rich automation capabilities that can lock doors, notify police and trigger alarms to ensure the best possible outcomes in the event of an active shooter incident.
Sarasota County Schools already completed a successful deployment in one of its high schools the past year, which received overwhelmingly positive results and response from parents and staff. It is now in the process of deploying the system with the entire district’s camera network. Sarasota County Schools educates and protects over 45,000 students across 56 schools and employs more than 5,200 teachers and staff including its own police department and school resource officers.
“Maintaining a safe learning environment is paramount for our school district,” said Terry Connor, Superintendent of Schools for Sarasota County. “Our district is fortunate to have a safety conscious School Board and community who understands this need and invests in solutions that will make for safer schools. It is critical to have additional layers of technology such as Omnilert Gun Detect working behind the scenes to ensure the safety our students and staff every day of the school year.”
“Omnilert Gun Detect clearly fit our requirements for flexible detection verification and response escalation with the ability to activate our existing infrastructure of safety systems,” said Sean O’Keefe, Director of Security at Sarasota County Schools. “Accurate gun detections and fast verifications are only the beginning of a response. It is critical for us to share the intelligence from Omnilert with our safety systems immediately to ensure we maximize as many seconds or minutes as possible for our police and security teams to respond to a potential situation and to protect lives.”
Omnilert Gun Detect is protecting several hundred schools and other organizations across the country, with many deployments being the largest ever recorded. Sarasota sets the record in Florida and is the second largest in the nation next to Baltimore County Public Schools, the largest deployment of AI visual gun detection in the United States with their 7,500 cameras. These large installations highlight the ease of use and flexibility that customers experience when integrating Omnilert technology with their existing cameras and security infrastructure. Security cameras can be transformed into 24/7 monitors of weapons that never get tired and distracted and can automatically initiate a pre-planned response to save lives in the event a weapon ever came on campus.
“Sarasota’s comprehensive safety program to enhance school security is a model for school districts across the nation as it combines early detection with an activation of safety systems that speeds response and removes the potential for human error,” commented Dave Fraser, CEO of Omnilert. “We make it a priority to ensure our technology integrates with other safety systems so security teams can capitalize on their existing investments and utilize a full range of capabilities to protect their people.”
Omnilert Gun Detect is an advanced AI system that detects handguns and long guns throughout a campus, both indoors and outdoors. Once a gun is detected, it sends an alert to a designated person at either Omnilert Monitoring centers or the customer’s security operations center to verify detections. When a threat is confirmed, Omnilert Gun Detect triggers a series of alerts that sets security systems into motion and police into action to protect those in harm’s way. This solution gives emergency response teams advance warning before shots are fired and delivers precise information on the location and a photo and video of the potential shooter for a much more effective response.
Unlike other solutions that merely provide weapon identification and verification, Omnilert Gun Detect integrates with video management systems, access controls systems, emergency mass notifications solutions, audio and video communication platforms and more. Omnilert’s software can easily be deployed with any existing IP-based camera and can monitor spaces that other safety technologies miss such as exterior grounds and parking lots. The software was designed with privacy concerns in mind so there is no use of biometrics like facial recognition and the live video feeds never leave the school premises.