Baltimore County Councilman Julian E. Jones Jr. is calling for a review of the school system’s procedures around its AI-powered weapon detection system after a false alarm led police to point their weapons at a student who’d been eating a bag of chips.
On Monday, the gun-detection system Omnilert flagged that Kenwood High School student Taki Allen could be holding a gun. It turned out to be a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos.
Jones, a 2026 candidate for county executive, said he wants a review of the school system’s policy, procedures and everything that led to “police officers pulling up on a kid with guns drawn.”
As a former fire chief, Jones said he knows that “when something really, really bad happens, you have multiple failure points.”
“Thank God nothing more happened,” he said.
Not only could this traumatize Allen, Jones said, but so many other bad things could have happened, like if Allen panicked, ran or if a nearby car backfired in a way that sounded like a gunshot.
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.
In this case, Omnilert’s monitoring team reviewed an image of “what appeared to be a firearm” on the person at Kenwood Monday night, said Blake Mitchell, a spokesperson for Omnilert.
He said the image closely resembled a gun. However, Allen, who was handcuffed and searched by police, said an officer showed him the picture and it looked like a bag of chips to him.
Kenwood Principal Kate Smith told parents that school administrators were alerted around 7 p.m. on Monday that a person on campus may have had a weapon. When the school district’s security department saw the alert, they reviewed and canceled it after confirming no weapon was present.
Not knowing the incident was cleared, Smith alerted the Kenwood school resource officer, who alerted Baltimore County Police.
Administrators are expected to work with central office security staff directly when an incident occurs, a school system spokesperson said.
Baltimore County Police said they were acting on the information they had at the time.
Superintendent Myriam Rogers said at a news conference on Thursday that the situation was “truly unfortunate.”
“We never want any student, whether it’s during school hours or not, to be in a situation that is frightening,” she said.
Rogers said reviewing and analyzing these types of situations is part of the school system’s normal practices, and noted that the system’s safety department works closely with county police.
She said Omnilert helps school officials respond within seconds to potential threats: “The purpose of the system is to keep all of our schools safe, to keep all of our students safe.”
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