Antioch High School is obscured by trees, but emergency personnel were still onsite after a student shot and killed a girl, injured a boy and later fatally shot himself in the school's cafeteria in Antioch, Tenn., on Jan. 22, 2025.
The program, called Omnilert, which connects to a school’s cameras and promises to turn “passive security systems into early warning and active prevention systems,” was activated by police responding to reports of an active shooter.
But because of the shooter’s location and proximity to the cameras, the system did not detect the presence of a weapon, Omnilert CEO David Frasertold NBC News.
“There is not one system that is 100% going to capture everything that a person may have on them,” Metro Nashville Public Schools Director Adrienne Battle added.
Battle is right. No AI system is perfect, which means that over-reliance on such tools can be treacherous. But with one student dead and another injured, in addition to the shooter, the question of “What if?” is impossible to fully ignore.