Police departments across the U.S. are quietly leveraging school district security cameras to assist President Donald Trump’s mass immigration enforcement campaign, an investigation by The 74 reveals. 

Hundreds of thousands of audit logs show police are searching a national database of automated license plate reader data, including from school cameras, for immigration-related investigations.

The audit logs originate from Texas school districts that contract with Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company that manufactures artificial intelligence-powered license plate readers and other surveillance technology. Flock’s cameras are designed to capture license plate numbers, timestamps and other identifying details, which are uploaded to a cloud server. Flock customers, including schools, can decide whether to share their information with other police agencies in the company’s national network. 

Multiple law enforcement leaders acknowledged they conducted the searches in the audit logs to help the U.S. Department of Homeland Security enforce federal immigration laws, with one saying the local assist was given without hesitation. The Trump administration’s aggressive DHS crackdown, which , has had a significant impact on schools. 

Educators, parents and students have been swept up, with immigrant families being targeted during . School parking lots are one place the cameras at the center of these searches can be found, along with other locations in the wider community, such as mounted on utility poles at intersections or along busy commercial streets.

The data raises questions about the degree to which campus surveillance technology intended for student safety is being repurposed to support immigration enforcement, whether school districts understand how broadly their data is being shared with federal agents and if meaningful guardrails exist to prevent misuse. 

“This just really underscores how far-reaching these systems can be,” said Phil Neff, research coordinator at the University of Washington Center for Human Rights. Out-of-state law enforcement agencies conducting searches that are unrelated to campus safety but include school district security cameras “really strains any sense of the appropriate use of this technology.”

Flock devices have been installed by more than 100 public school systems nationally, government procurement records show, and audit logs from six Texas school districts show campus camera feeds are captured in a national database that police agencies across the country can access. School district Flock cameras are queried far more often by out-of-state police officers than by the districts themselves, according to the records.

School police officers use Flock cameras to investigate “road rage,” “speeding on campus,” “vandalism” and “criminal mischief,” records show. There is no evidence school districts themselves use the devices for immigration-related purposes — or that they’re aware other agencies do so. 

and previously revealed that police agencies nationwide were tapping into Flock camera feeds to help federal immigration officials track targets. In some cases, local law enforcement agencies enabled direct sharing of their networks with U.S. Border Patrol. 

Immigration officials’ unprecedented use of surveillance tactics to carry out their controversial mission has . That school district cameras are part of that dragnet has not been previously reported. 

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called the revelation an “egregious end run around the Constitution” that will add to the pressure on Congress to rein in U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement. By accessing campus feeds, she said, immigration authorities are violating the rights of students, parents and educators “to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.” 

The teachers union in September after it ended a longstanding policy against conducting immigration enforcement actions in and around  

“Schools are sacred spaces — and ICE knows it needs a judicial warrant to access them,” Weingarten said in a statement. The teachers union filed its lawsuit, she said, “so schools remain safe and welcoming places, not targets for warrantless surveillance and militarized raids.”

‘The scale of it is phenomenal’

At the Huffman Independent School District northeast of Houston, records reveal it was the campus police chief’s administrative assistant who granted U.S. Border Patrol access to district Flock Safety license plate readers in May.  

Police departments nationwide also routinely tapped into the eight Flock cameras installed at the 30,000-student Alvin Independent School District south of Houston. Over a one-month period from December 2025 through early January, more than 3,100 police agencies conducted more than 733,000 searches on the district’s cameras, The 74’s analysis of public records revealed. Of those, immigration-related reasons were cited 620 times by 30 law enforcement agencies including ones in Florida, Georgia, Indiana and Tennessee. 

Flock offers a list of standardized reasons that agencies must choose from when running a search. For the Alvin school district’s cameras, immigration-related reasons identified by The 74 include “Immigration (civil/administrative)” and “Immigration (criminal).” 

The data put into focus the scale of digital surveillance at school districts nationally and “just how dangerous these tools are,” said Ed Vogel, a researcher and organizer with The NOTICE Coalition: No Tech Criminalization in Education.

“The scale of it is phenomenal, and it’s something that I think is difficult for individual people in their cities, towns and communities to fully appreciate,” said Vogel, who’s also with the surveillance-monitoring Lucy Parsons Labs in Chicago. 

The Flock camera audit logs and other public records about their use by school districts were provided exclusively to The 74 by The NOTICE Coalition, a national network of researchers and advocates seeking to end mass youth surveillance. The 74 also filed public records requests to obtain information on schools’ use of Flock cameras and conducted an analysis to reveal the extent of the immigration-related searches. Those findings were shared with the law enforcement agencies and school districts mentioned in this story. 

Three of the 10 agencies that conducted the most immigration-related searches in the Alvin school district logs participate in the 287(g) program, which deputizes local officers to perform certain immigration enforcement functions and has also become a point of controversy. The program has during Trump’s second term.

Alvin school district Police Chief Michael Putnal directed all questions to district spokesperson Renae Rives, who provided public records to The 74 but did not acknowledge multiple requests for comment. 

Amanda Fortenberry, the spokesperson for the Huffman school district, said in an email the district is “reviewing the matters you referenced,” but declined to comment further.

Flock Safety, which across 7,000 networks nationally, didn’t respond to The 74’s requests for comment, nor did the Department of Homeland Security.

‘We will assist them — no questions asked’

Camera settings information obtained by The 74 through public records requests suggests that Alvin school district police officers are unable to search their own devices for immigration-related purposes. But the school system allows such queries routinely from out-of-state police officers, audit logs reveal. 

Flock searches for civil immigration reasons that appeared in the Alvin school logs, such as trying to locate someone who is unlawfully present in the U.S., were more than two times more frequent than those conducted for investigations involving immigrants suspected or convicted of committing a crime. 

Also included among the reasons given for immigration-related searches are “I.C.E.,” in reference to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “ERO proactive crim case research,” an apparent reference to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division and “CBP Investigation,” an apparent reference to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

In Carrollton, Georgia, officers routinely use Flock’s nationwide lookup to track suspects outside their jurisdiction, Lt. Blake Hitchcock said in an interview. Immigration-related searches that appear in the Alvin school district’s audit log by the Carrollton Police Department were conducted to assist federal agents at the request of the Department of Homeland Security, Hitchcock said. He declined to elaborate on specifics.

Federal agents “were working directly” with a Carrollton police officer who had access to the Flock cameras “and they asked him to run it and they did,” Hitchcock said. If federal agents ask his office to help them with an immigration case, Hitchcock said, “we will assist them — no questions asked.”

Flock searches are typically broad national queries, and officers do not select individual cameras, he explained. Instead, with each search request, the system automatically checks every camera that Flock customers share with the nationwide database, including those operated by school districts.

Because a school district is part of the national lookup, Hitchcock said, its cameras will be searched any time another participating agency conducts a nationwide inquiry. He said Flock’s nationwide search is helpful to track people who “go from jurisdiction to jurisdiction to commit crimes.” He pointed to in 2020 when Carrollton officers used Flock cameras to rescue a 1-year-old who was kidnapped at gunpoint some 60 miles away. 

In Galveston, Texas, Constable Justin West confirmed that immigration-related searches that appeared in the Alvin school district’s audit logs from his department were tied to the county’s participation in the federal 287(g) program.

County deputies with federal immigration enforcement powers “have been working on arresting targeted criminal illegal aliens,” West wrote in an email, and use Flock cameras “to determine locations and travel patterns of the illegal aliens being sought.” 

Galveston deputies’ Flock searches that appeared in the Alvin school district audit logs led to several arrests, West said, while several of the investigations remain ongoing. Flock logs show the Galveston County searches were conducted for both criminal and civil immigration investigations. 

While the Trump administration maintains its immigration crackdown centers on removing dangerous criminals, surged to 43% in January. and immigrants with no pending civil immigration actions against them have similarly been detained. 

Other agencies that participate in the 287(g) program that were heavily represented in the Alvin ISD logs include the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, each of which conducted more than 60 immigration-related searches that queried the school district’s cameras in the one-month period. 

The Texas Department of Public Safety and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission were among four agencies that did not respond to The 74’s inquiries about their searches. The other two were the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia and the Greene County Sheriff’s Office in Ohio. 

In Mesquite, Texas, searches labeled “Immigration (criminal)” were “conducted as part of an investigation to locate a suspect wanted on felony criminal charges,” Lt. Curtis Phillip said in an email. While the suspect “was believed to be unlawfully present in the United States,” Phillip said his department doesn’t use Flock cameras “for the purpose of enforcing federal civil immigration law.”

“When a search is conducted across the shared network, the activity may appear in the audit records of all participating system owners, even when the investigation itself is unrelated to schools or school-based activity,” Phillip said. “There is no efficient mechanism to exclude specific entities, such as school districts, from those searches.”

In Grant County, Indiana, 238 immigration-related searches included in the Alvin ISD audit logs were conducted “by one of our deputies” as part of “a confidential investigation,” Jay Kay, chief deputy of the county sheriff’s office, said in an email. He didn’t elaborate further. The reason given for the search in the Flock audit log was “Immigration (civil/administrative) – Test.” 

It’s not clear whether every search tagged as immigration-related necessarily was. John Samples, captain of the Little Elm, Texas, police department, said a detective selected “immigration” as a search reason while assisting the Department of Homeland Security on a sex crimes investigation and a separate terrorism-related case. That word choice, Samples said, was “not the best course of action” and will be “corrected on our end.”  

The police department in Texas City, Texas, denied it used the system to enforce federal immigration laws. While the agency monitors “several thousand Flock Cameras across the United States,” Captain Brandon Shives said his department’s searches in the Alvin ISD logs should not have been categorized as immigration-related and that it was the result of a “clerical error.”

‘Your community and beyond’

Flock Safety has repeatedly stated that it does not provide the Department of Homeland Security with direct access to its cameras and that all data-sharing decisions are made by local customers, including school districts. 

“ICE cannot directly access Flock cameras or data,” the company . “Local public safety agencies sometimes collaborate with federal partners on serious crimes such as human trafficking, child exploitation or multi-jurisdictional violent crime,” but decisions about “how data is shared are made by the customer that owns the data, not by Flock.”

The company acknowledged in August it ran pilot programs with the DHS to assist federal human trafficking and fentanyl distribution investigations but that “all ongoing federal pilots have been paused” after the initiative faced scrutiny and legal pushback.

Public records provided by the Alvin school district, which began purchasing Flock cameras in 2023 and has since spent more than $50,000 on its eight devices, include Flock marketing materials that tout the ability to share data with other police agencies. 

“Not only do we place cameras where you need them,” the document notes, “we offer access to available cameras in your community and beyond your jurisdiction.”

In fact, nationwide sharing is a staple of Flock’s business model, said Dave Maass, director of investigations at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. Maass has spent the last decade researching how police use automated license plate readers like Flock and, in at least one case last year, in Texas, where the procedure is illegal. 

“That’s something that’s a selling point for them,” Maass said, adding that his research has shown that police agencies agree to provide outside officers access to their Flock data with little deliberation. 

“You know how maybe your grandparents approve every friend request they get on Facebook?” Maass said. “It’s like that. It’s always been like that. You’ll have an agency that will request access to other places and other places will just not even question it. They’ll just hit ‘sure, approve.’”

‘A unique level of responsibility to protect their students’

Flock Safety provides audit logs that allow law enforcement customers to see how their automated license plate reader cameras are being used. The reports “support accountability and public trust by making usage patterns visible and reviewable,” the company said in the recent blog post. 

None of the law enforcement officials contacted by The 74 said they used the audit logs to ensure people with access to their data queried the information for legitimate and legal purposes. Given the overwhelming volume of law enforcement searches that are included in the Alvin school district audit logs in just a month, Maass said, such reviews would be practically impossible.

Adam Wandt, an attorney and associate professor at New York City’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said license plate readers can be invaluable tools for solving serious crimes and finding missing persons. 

But he also acknowledged the devices present significant privacy concerns and questioned whether the broad sharing of school-controlled camera data violates federal student privacy rules. The revelation that school-owned Flock cameras are being queried for immigration enforcement purposes, he said, “will cause significant discussions to be had in the near future within many school districts” that contract with the company. 

“School districts are in a unique position, they have a unique level of responsibility to protect their students in specific ways,” including their privacy, Wandt said.

Vogel of the NOTICE Coalition said students and parents should demand transparency from their school districts about whether they employ Flock license plate readers and whether the data from those cameras are being fed to immigration agents. 

“These are just tools, and whoever has control over them gets to define how they’re used,” Vogel said. “I have a feeling that immigration enforcement was not one of the reasons that was discussed when they said, ‘We need to get a contract with Flock Safety.’”

More than 7,000 cameras equipped with artificial intelligence capabilities will be installed in Newark schools, under a $12 million contract approved Thursday by the Newark Board of Education.

District officials say the high-tech surveillance system is meant to make schools safer, but that systems with such capabilities could result in an invasion of privacy or could potentially misidentify items or students.

Turn-Key Technologies Inc., based in Sayreville, N.J., will install the cameras and their required servers and storage across schools this summer as part of a two-year contract. Approving the contract was “time-sensitive,” said Valerie Wilson, Newark’s school business administrator, as district officials want the 7,700 cameras – roughly one for every five students – in place by Aug. 31, before the start of the new school year.

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The project will be funded in part by federal COVID relief dollars, specifically, American Rescue Plan dollars that expire at the end of September, in conjunction with local funds and grants, Wilson added.

Board member Vereliz Santana said the project was “comprehensive and ambitious” and asked for routine updates as installation begins in June. Other members raised questions about how the system would work to detect vaping.

“It’s a large bid, as you can see from the funds that are being allocated, but we want to make effective use of our federal funding,” said Wilson during Thursday’s meeting.

The new system comes as city leaders and advocates call for measures to reduce violence among youth in Newark.

The city will begin enforcing a youth curfew on Friday. The rule is in response to an increase in youth violence, said , which includes two shooting incidents this school year. In November, a 15-year-old Central High School student was shot during a drive-by and in March, another two students were shot outside West Side High School.

Turn-Key’s new system will expand the district’s surveillance capabilities, going beyond its current camera system to detect weapons and track people and cars across schools by using license plate and facial recognition. Last year, Newark schools said new technology was needed because its current security set-up is “outdated, inefficient,” pointing to no remote access, storage, and other limitations.

In May 2023, the district said it expected to install cameras by the end of that year after requesting bids from surveillance technology companies in September 2023. But the installation was delayed for almost a year after bidders did not meet the New Jersey Alarm or Locksmith License requirement, prompting the district to revise its project specifications and request bids for a second time in April 2024, Wilson said.

In addition to upgrading the district’s surveillance technology, the new setup will use an “Avigilon surveillance system,” a type of framework that allows Newark to expand its systems as security needs change or develop, said Jermaine Wilson, a senior research engineer , a security and surveillance research group.

That system will work with that can detect vape, gun sounds, and abnormal noise in areas where there are no cameras such as bathrooms, according to the district’s request for proposal.

“I want to be very clear to everybody that in no way shape or form will this result in an invasion of privacy of anyone’s students, staff, or otherwise,” Wilson said. “Cameras and devices will not and cannot be placed in areas that are not approved and authorized.”

The contract was approved by all school board members except Crystal Williams who abstained from voting. During the Thursday meeting, board member Josephine Garcia said vaping in schools is an issue the district has “been battling and sounding the alarm on for quite some time.” She requested clarification on the type of vape sensors that will be used in schools, an explanation that would be given during the board’s private operations committee meeting this month due to security concerns, Wilson said.

“So as we talk about our safety and security initiatives, we want to ensure that we do not provide all of our information in the public domain,” Wilson added.

Superintendent Roger León said the district is in conversation with the city’s Office of Emergency Management “about a number of things” that are set to take place this coming school year. He would share more information with the public “once those initiatives are in effect,” León added.

Wilson also said city police officials would not have access to the system, which includes cameras inside and outside of school buildings and other district locations.

The district has spent millions to increase security over the years. The school district to scan students for contraband and weapons and added six new patrol cars for school safety officers. It also provided its security guards with training on bag scanners, active shooter response, and the district’s drug and alcohol policy. Newark plans to hire more security guards and update its software to track school incidents.

Thursday’s contract was approved during May’s reorganization meeting where Haynes, Santana, Helena Vinhas, and Kanileah Anderson were sworn in after winning . Hasani Council was chosen as board president, along with Santana and Allison James-Frison as co-vice presidents.

Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

This was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at . Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

When students in suburban Atlanta returned to school for in-person classes amid the pandemic, they were required to cover their faces with cloth masks like in many places across the U.S. Yet in this 95,000-student district, officials took mask compliance a step further than most. 

Through a network of security cameras, officials harnessed artificial intelligence to identify students whose masks drooped below their noses. 

“If they say a picture is worth a thousand words, if I send you a piece of video — it’s probably worth a million,” said Paul Hildreth, the district’s emergency operations coordinator. “You really can’t deny, ‘Oh yeah, that’s me, I took my mask off.’”

The school district in Fulton County had installed the surveillance network, by , years before the pandemic shuttered schools nationwide in 2020. Under a constant fear of mass school shootings, districts in recent years have increasingly deployed controversial surveillance networks like cameras with facial recognition and gun detection.

With the pandemic, security vendors switched directions and began marketing their wares as a solution to stop the latest threat. In Fulton County, the district used Avigilon’s “No Face Mask Detection” technology to identify students with their faces exposed. 

During remote learning, the pandemic ushered in a new era of digital student surveillance as schools turned to AI-powered services like remote proctoring and in search of threats and mental health warning signs. Back on campus, districts have rolled out tools like badges that track students’ every move. 

But one of the most significant developments has been in AI-enabled cameras. Twenty years ago, security cameras were present in 19 percent of schools, according to . Today, that . Powering those cameras with artificial intelligence makes automated surveillance possible, enabling things like temperature checks and the collection of other biometric data.

Districts across the country have said they’ve bought AI-powered cameras to fight the pandemic. But  as pandemic-era protocols like mask mandates end, experts said the technology will remain. Some educators have stated plans to leverage pandemic-era surveillance tech for student discipline while others hope AI cameras will help them identify youth carrying guns. 

The cameras have faced sharp resistance from civil rights advocates who questioned their effectiveness and argue they trample students’ privacy rights.

Noa Young, a 16-year-old junior in Fulton County, said she knew that cameras monitored her school but wasn’t aware of their high-tech features like mask detection. She agreed with the district’s now-expired mask mandate but felt that educators should have been more transparent about the technology in place.

“I think it’s helpful for COVID stuff but it seems a little intrusive,” Young said in an interview. “I think it’s strange that we were not aware of that.”

‘Smoke and mirrors’

Outside of Fulton County, educators have used AI cameras to fight COVID on multiple fronts. 

In Rockland Maine’s Regional School Unit 13, officials used federal pandemic relief money to procure a network of cameras for contact tracing. Through advanced surveillance, the cameras by allow the 1,600-student district to identify students who came in close contact with classmates who tested positive for COVID-19. In its , Verkada explains how districts could use federal funds tied to the public health crisis to buy its cameras for contact tracing and crowd control. 

At a district in suburban Houston, officials spent nearly $75,000 on AI-enabled cameras from , a surveillance company owned in part by the Chinese government, and deployed thermal imaging and facial detection to identify students with elevated temperatures and those without masks. 

The cameras can screen as many as 30 people at a time and are therefore “less intrusive” than slower processes, said Ty Morrow, the Brazosport Independent School District’s head of security. The checkpoints have helped the district identify students who later tested positive for COVID-19, Morrow said, although has argued Hikvision’s claim of accurately scanning 30 people at once is not possible. 

“That was just one more tool that we had in the toolbox to show parents that we were doing our due diligence to make sure that we weren’t allowing kids or staff with COVID into the facilities,” he said.  

Yet it’s this mentality that worries consultant Kenneth Trump, the president of Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services. Security hardware for the sake of public perception, the industry expert said, is simply “smoke and mirrors.”

“It’s creating a façade,” he said. “Parents think that all the bells and whistles are going to keep their kids safer and that’s not necessarily the case. With cameras, in the vast majority of schools, nobody is monitoring them.”

‘You don’t have to like something’

When the Fulton County district upgraded its surveillance camera network in 2018, officials were wooed by Avigilon’s AI-powered “Appearance Search,” which allows security officials to sift through a mountain of video footage and identify students based on characteristics like their hairstyle or the color of their shirt. When the pandemic hit, the company’s mask detection became an attractive add-on, Hildreth said.

He said the district didn’t actively advertise the technology to students but they likely became aware of it quickly after students got called out for breaking the rules. He doesn’t know students’ opinions about the cameras — and didn’t seem to care. 

“I wasn’t probably as much interested in their reaction as much as their compliance,” Hildreth said. “You don’t have to like something that’s good for you, but you still need to do it.”

A Fulton County district spokesman said they weren’t aware of any instances where students were disciplined because the cameras caught them without masks. 

After the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, pitched its cameras with AI-powered “gun detection” as a promising school safety strategy. Similar to facial recognition, the gun detection system uses artificial intelligence to spot when a weapon enters a camera’s field of view. By identifying people with guns before shots are fired, the service is “like Minority Report but in real life,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email at the time, referring to the that predicts a dystopian future of mass surveillance. During the pandemic, the company rolled out thermal cameras that a company spokesperson wrote in an email could “accurately pre-screen 2,000 people per hour.”

The spokesperson declined an interview request but said in an email that Athena is “not a surveillance company” and did not want to be portrayed as “spying on” students. 

Among the school security industry’s staunchest critics is Sneha Revanur, a 17-year-old high school student from San Jose, California, who founded to highlight the dangers of artificial intelligence on civil liberties. 

Revanur said she’s concerned by districts’ decisions to implement surveillance cameras as a public health strategy and that the technology in schools could result in harsher discipline for students, particularly youth of color. 

Verkada offers a cautionary tale about the potential harms of pervasive school surveillance and student data collection. Last year, when a hack exposed the live feeds of 150,000 surveillance cameras, including those inside Tesla factories, jails and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The Newtown district, which suffered a mass school shooting in 2012, said compromising information about students. The some educators from contracting with the California-based company. 

After a back-and-forth with the Verkada spokesperson, the company would not grant an interview or respond to a list of written questions. 

Revanur called the Verkada hack at Sandy Hook Elementary a “staggering indictment” of educators’ rush for “dragnet surveillance systems that treat everyone as a constant suspect” at the expense of student privacy. Constant monitoring, she argued, “creates this culture of fear and paranoia that truly isn’t the most proactive response to gun violence and safety concerns.” 

In Fayette County, Georgia, the district spent about $500,000 to purchase 70 Hikvision cameras with thermal imaging to detect students with fevers. But it and disabled them over their efficacy and Hikvision’s ties to the Chinese government. In 2019, the U.S. government , alleging the company was implicated in China’s “campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention and high-technology surveillance” against Muslim ethnic minorities.

 The school district declined to comment. In a statement, a Hikvision spokesperson said the company “takes all reports regarding human rights very seriously” and has engaged governments globally “to clarify misunderstandings about the company.” The company is “committed to upholding the right to privacy,” the spokesperson said. 

Meanwhile, Regional School Unit 13’s decision to use Verkada security cameras as a contact tracing tool could run afoul of in Maine schools. The district didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

Michael Kebede, the ACLU of Maine’s policy counsel, cited recent studies on facial recognition’s flaws in and and called on the district to reconsider its approach. 

“We fundamentally disagree that using a tool of mass surveillance is a way to promote the health and safety of students,” Kobede said in a statement. “It is a civil liberties nightmare for everyone, and it perpetuates the surveillance of already marginalized communities.”

White faces

In Fulton County, school officials wound up disabling the face mask detection feature in cafeterias because it was triggered by people eating lunch. Other times, it identified students who pulled their masks down briefly to take a drink of water. 

In suburban Houston, Morrow ran into similar hurdles. When white students wore light-colored masks, for example, the face detection sounded alarms. And if students rode bikes to school, the cameras flagged their elevated temperatures. 

“We’ve got some false positives but it was not a failure of the technology,” Hildreth said. “We just had to take a look and adapt what we were looking at to match our needs.”

With those lessons learned, Hildreth said he hopes to soon equip Fulton County campuses with AI-enabled cameras that identify students who bring guns to school. He sees a future where algorithms identify armed students “in the same exact manner” as Avigilon’s mask detection. 

In a post-pandemic world, Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the nonprofit , worries the entire school security industry will take a similar approach. In February, educators in Waterbury, Connecticut, a new network of campus surveillance cameras with weapons detection. 

“With the pandemic hopefully waning, we’ll see a lot of security vendors pivoting back to school shooting rhetoric as justification for the camera systems,” he said. Due to the potential for errors, Cahn called the embrace of AI gun detection “really alarming.” 

Disclosure: This story was produced in partnership with . It is part of a reporting series that is supported by the which works to build vibrant and inclusive democracies whose governments are accountable to their citizens. All content is editorially independent and overseen by Guardian and 74 editors.