Baltimore County Public Schools officials say a retraining is in order after police drew guns on a Kenwood High School student whose bag of chips was mistaken for a gun.

Omnilert, the school’s AI-powered weapon detection system, initiated the false alarm last week. Councilman Julian Jones, a county executive candidate for 2026, called on Baltimore County Public Schools to review procedures around the technology.

As a former fire chief, Jones said on Thursday, he knows that “when something really, really bad happens, you have multiple failure points.”

This week, Jones commended both the school system and the Baltimore County Police Department for their response.

“Both agencies confirmed that they conduct incident reviews as part of their regular practice, examined with me all aspects of this troubling incident, and shared examples where the Omnilert system captured valuable information that helped prevent bad outcomes,” Jones said in an emailed statement sent by the school system Tuesday afternoon.

However, he said they all agree that staff should be retrained annually to ensure they follow “appropriate existing protocols.”

Baltimore County Public Schools has a three-year, $2.6 million contract with Omnilert that ends in 2027. The technology searches image frames from 7,000 school cameras for people and the objects surrounding them. If it detects a gun, it alerts principals and safety assistants inside the building, as well as security staff in the school system’s central office.

School system officials and an Omnilert spokesperson said the technology worked as intended during last week’s incident.

Omnilert flagged the bag of Cool Ranch Doritos that 16-year-old Taki Allen was holding as a possible weapon. A company spokesperson said the lighting and other issues with the image made the bag look like a gun. He declined to share the image, citing Omnilert’s privacy policy.

Allen, who said police showed him the image, disagreed. “It looked like a bag of chips,” he said in an interview last week.

Allen’s grandfather, Lamont Davis, questioned if racial bias played a part in Omnilert flagging his grandson, who is Black. Experts have argued that racial bias seeps into the development of AI tools.

In the Tuesday email, the school system explained that Omnilert automatically generates an alert when it identifies an object that appears to be weapon.

“All alerts are based on objects, not individuals,” the email stated.

Trained school system safety professionals review the image and either validate or cancel the alert based on what they see. Canceling means that no action is taken. Validating means that safety personnel notify police.

Alerts are sent to school building staff for awareness, school officials wrote.

Here’s a timeline of events during the Kenwood High incident, according to the school system:

• 7:04 p.m. — Omnilert sent an alert for review.
• 7:05-7:06 p.m. — School system safety personnel and the Maryland Safe Schools Facilitator reviewed the alert and canceled it.
• 7:17 p.m. — Kenwood’s principal reported the alert to a school resource officer. “Because this alert was received after school hours, the SRO called the local precinct,” school officials stated.
• 7:23 p.m. — Police arrived at Kenwood after receiving a report of a suspicious person with a weapon.

Moving forward, staff will be reminded during their annual safety training about what to do when they receive an Omnilert notification, the email stated.

Administrators, such as principals, will let the district’s executive director of school safety or the executive director of schools know if the administrator has a concern. And county police will remind school resource officers of their after-hours procedures.

“We will all remain vigilant about how our technology is functioning,” Jones said in his statement.

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