Recently, an outrageous incident occurred in Baltimore County, Maryland, USA:A local AI gun detection system misidentified a 16-year-old student's Doritos cornflakes bag as a firearm, causing armed police to be dispatched.
The incident occurred on October 20. Taki Allen, a student at Kenwood High School, had just finished football practice and was staying outside the school with friends. Suddenly, multiple police cars sped up and the police pointed guns at them.
Allen recalled: "There were about eight police cars driving towards us. They came towards me with guns drawn and yelled, 'Get on the ground,' and I thought, 'What's going on?'" He described the fear at the time:"They made me kneel down with my hands tied behind my back and handcuffed. Then they searched me and found nothing."
Allen was subdued by the police at gunpoint, and the police later showed him the AI intercepted image that triggered the alarm. In the image, the crumpled Doritos bag in his pocket was mistaken for a gun by the system.
"I was mainly thinking, 'Am I going to die? Are they going to kill me?' They showed me the picture and said it looked like a gun," Allen said with lingering fear.
The AI system that triggered the incident comes from Omnilert, a technology introduced by Baltimore County Public Schools last year that scans existing surveillance footage in real time and immediately alerts law enforcement when it detects an object it believes is a weapon.
Allen was holding a bag of cornflakes, and his exposed hands and one finger looked like he was holding a gun. Omnilert acknowledged that it was a false alarm, but argued that the system "worked as intended" and was designed to "prioritize safety through rapid manual verification."
