The Uvalde, Texas, school district is installing an artificial intelligence-based gun detection system, as the area continues to grapple with the fallout of a 2022 school shooting that left 19 students and two teachers dead.
A company called Omnialert plans to offer the district its technology, which automatically monitors security feeds for the presence of an individual with a gun, for free as part of a three-year grant program.
“We felt very strongly–particularly with the tragedy that occurred in Uvalde–that it made sense for us to create a grant program specifically for these types of school districts that have already been impacted by a tragedy,” Omnialert CEO Dave Fraser told KXAN.
The executive added that the system, which flags a human to review possible alerts and then notifies first responders for confirmed matches, does not track biometric data.
“It’s important that there’s absolutely no form of biometrics or facial recognition, nothing that makes a human being, individually or personally, recognizable at all in our system,” he said. “All it’s doing is it’s looking for the shape of a human being holding a brandished firearm.”
The small-town Texas community continues to scrutinize the tragic shooting, one of the worst school massacres in U.S. history.
This spring, the city of Uvalde settled with victims’ families for $2 million.
A group of Uvalde parents has also sued video game company Activision and Instagram parent company Meta, arguing they helped promote the firearm used in the shooting. Activision has pushed back and sought to dismiss the suit this month, arguing these claims violate the First Amendment and past precedent.
Pete Arredondo, the former Uvalde schools police chief, is awaiting trial on charges of child abandonment and endangerment over the chaotic response to the shooting. He has pleaded not guilty.
The school district and law enforcement response to the shooting at Robb Elementary, which involved hundreds of police officers and federal Border Patrol personnel, has been roundly criticized.
The 18-year-old gunman was first able to enter the school through an unlocked back door.
Police arrived on the scene of the school within three minutes of the first shots being fired, but officers ultimately waited over an hour until a heavily armed Border Patrol SWAT team arrived to confront and kill the teen gunman, as he barricaded himself inside a classroom with children and fired multiple shots.
Arredondo, the then-chief, initially lacked a radio as the shooting unfolded, and officers reportedly never tried to open a door into the classroom where the gunman was hiding, believing it was locked and instead waited for a key.
A 2023 Texas Tribune investigation captured officers just outside the classroom fretting about being shot if they confronted the gunman.
“What’s the safest way to do this? I’m not trying to get clapped out,” one officer can be heard saying on radio communications obtained by the publication. “Me neither,” another responds.
Uvalde school police had conducted active shooter training just weeks before the massacre, and had invested heavily in security and training in previous years, but appeared unprepared for an active shooter situation.
A 2024 Justice Department review said the response to the shooting showed “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training” at all levels, while a Homeland Security report that same year said law enforcement did not establish a clear line of command, “leading to delays, inaction, and potentially further loss of life.”
In the wake of the shooting, Texas lawmakers passed a bill this year to improve police training and school security infrastructure.
In 2024, state officials announced the creation of a new $34 million behavioral health campus in the area to improve mental health treatment.
