Shuls add ZeroEyes to security arsenals
Former Navy SEALs and algorithms target possible gun incidents as they develop
As director of security for his northern New Jersey shul, Jonathan Blinken is always looking for different ways to enhance its multilayered approach to security.
“Security is not just about people standing in an entrance with a gun or uniform on,” he said. “It’s much more complicated, and you have to have multiple layers. Particularly since the Tree of Life shooting and Jersey City and of course October 7, there is a tremendous need to upgrade security at Jewish houses of worship and Jewish institutions.
“And the greatest potential threat comes from a firearm because you can dislodge many rounds very quickly in a crowded place, and it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. It’s not so difficult to injure and kill people.”
Mr. Blinken is a financial advisor, “but oddly enough I’m a protection-first financial advisor,” he said. “First, we seek to protect people’s assets, and then help them grow. So it’s the same thing with the synagogue. We first want to protect people and then help people grow Jewishly.”
When Mr. Blinken first met with ZeroEyes, a company that uses an algorithm to monitor security cameras for guns in order to stop mass shootings, “two words came to mind about the founders and the people that work there,” he said. “Impeccable integrity. Most are former members of the armed services or law enforcement — many were Navy SEALs or Army Rangers. They do what they say they’re going to do, and they do it on time.”
Sam Alaimo is one of ZeroEyes’ co-founders and its chief revenue officer. He established the company in 2018 with people he met during his time as a Navy SEAL.
When Mr. Alaimo left the Navy in 2013, he earned an MBA from Columbia University, then “bounced around the business world looking for some sort of purpose and some good fight,” he said. “It didn’t fulfill me. I missed a mission, being of service in some way.” Some of his colleagues from the Navy shared that feeling.
“In 2018, the Parkland shooting happened,” Mr. Alaimo said, referring to the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which 17 people were killed. “And that was when we realized the problem in America would continue to grow. So we quit our jobs and founded ZeroEyes with the intent to keep kids in K-through-12 schools safe. We basically decided we were going to make a massive pivot in life and learn how to build an AI algorithm from scratch.”
It took about two years to develop the algorithm. “We built our model from the ground up,” Mr. Alaimo said. “We did it the hard way. We built it by filming our own videos with our own techniques, our own cameras, our own guns. We did not do what they call ‘scrape the web’ — we didn’t just pull a bunch of images from online — we actually filmed it and actually broke it apart and did what we call annotation, frame by frame, and basically taught the algorithm what is a gun and what is not.
“So we have the most in-depth and detailed gun-detection algorithm on earth.”
The algorithm was ready in 2020. Then the covid lockdown happened, so the company had to shift from its original plan to work with elementary, middle and high schools. “We pivoted to commercial, to religious institutions, to Department of Defense,” Mr. Alaimo said. “And we scaled throughout covid and found we add value not just in K-through-12 settings but in every other function as well, including religious institutions.”
ZeroEyes now operates in thousands of buildings in 46 states. The five founders still run the company, “but our team is now over 200 employees. We’ve got quite a few religious institutions and are all over K-12 schools, higher education, commercial, and Department of Defense.”
The company continues to record video footage for training purposes. “We’ve done quite a few videos at actual sites of K-12 schools, churches, synagogues, casinos, hospitals, grocery stores, shopping malls, arenas — many diverse data sets — so we’re very good at picking up guns in very strange environments, very population-dense environments, high light, low light, black gun on black clothes, you name it, we have built it into the algorithm.”
When ZeroEyes starts working with a client, “we do a site assessment, so we make sure that the security cameras they have are up to date, clean, functioning, and in the right locations,” he said. “If they’re not, we’ll make the best recommendations we can and partner with them to get cameras in the right spots.”
ZeroEyes then uses those cameras for “visual gun detection,” Mr. Alaimo continued. “So if someone pulls a gun in front of one of those cameras, an alert will be sent to our operating center that we man 24/7/365. Everyone in that room is former law enforcement or military, so they’re very calm under pressure and they’re very good at identifying guns. We confirm it is actually a true positive gun. If it is, we dispatch it to law enforcement and the client, and we do all that in about three to five seconds. So from the moment a gun is seen in a parking lot or in a building, within three to five seconds law enforcement has that information and the client has that information so they can enact security protocols with full situation awareness.”
The company only monitors for guns, Mr. Alaimo stressed. It does not surveil. “We’re not watching human beings. The algorithm is waiting to detect an object. A gun. So we’re not looking at live security feeds.
“If you came into our operating center, you would see a bunch of men and women staring at blank screens. That screen only lights up with an image when the algorithm says, ‘hey, I think it’s a gun.’ That still frame image pops up, and they decide, is it a gun? If yes, they dispatch; if no, they don’t dispatch.
“We find the vast majority of times the gun is exposed before it’s fired and we want to pick it up before it even makes it inside the building. Oftentimes, the shooting starts outside before it ever gets to a metal detector. We want to take that moment, those precious seconds, and send the alert before it gets there.”
That alert not only enables law enforcement to arrive earlier, it lets them know exactly what’s going on so they don’t have to waste time figuring it out. “The moment the gun is seen or a shot is fired, a hundred different calls are going to inundate 911 with conflicting information — the number of shooters, the location of the shooter, the type of weapon system. We cut through all that noise. We send an image of the shooter, the time the shooter was in that spot, and the exact location, so if you have a larger campus, police don’t have to figure out where everybody is and what’s going on. They can literally drive right to the point of the shooting and stop the shooting itself.”
ZeroEyes monitors security cameras constantly, even when a building is closed, in order to prevent someone from hiding a weapon on the premises at night or during off hours for a future use.
“We have a lot of Jewish institutions that have been part of our mission, part of our fight, for some time now,” Mr. Alaimo said. “Given some of the unfortunate events in the last few years — events in the Middle East, more targeted antisemitism — hopefully, with our technology, we can help mitigate some of the harm that might be directed against these sorts of institutions.”
Mr. Blinken sees the monitoring as a “vitally important tool” for any institution that fears potential gun violence. “Unfortunately, that could be a ShopRite parking lot, a mall, university, school, Amazon warehouse or post office,” he said. As soon as a weapon is displayed in the vicinity of one of the synagogue’s security cameras, “local police is informed, so that they come on the scene very quickly.
“Law-enforcement obviously is the first line of defense, but our synagogue has other lines of defense as well, both seen and unseen,” Mr. Blinken continued.
If a gun is displayed, “my team gets an SMS message with a picture of the perpetrator and an orange box around the weapon, so we know what kind of weapon we’re dealing with and we know what the person looks like and we know what camera” detected the gun. As the perpetrator moves around, they will “leave a bread crumb trail from camera to camera so we can find them.
“There’s also a live person at ZeroEyes, someone who has experience working in stressful situations, who now has access to our cameras and is on the phone with us, sort of like an air traffic control controller, guiding us.”
The ZeroEyes system not only detects guns, it also functions as a deterrent. “If you look at the psychology of a mass shooter, their goal is to be famous,” Mr. Alaimo said. “Their goal is to have their face on the news, to be spoken of and to be worshipped as a mass shooter. They want the notoriety. So if these shooters know that there’s software there that’s going to limit their amount of time, that will send a notification to law enforcement, they might just go somewhere else.”
ZeroEyes monitoring has resulted in dozens of arrests, Mr. Alaimo added. “When a client gets that image of a gun and an arrest is made before a shot is fired, I can’t tell you how many mass shootings did not happen.”
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