Talbot County Schools piloting Safetime App aimed at preventing school shootings
TALBOT COUNTY, Md. – Talbot County Public School grades 6 through 12 will be the first to pilot a new app Safetime, aimed at troubling posts and behaviors by peers, and streamlining the reporting process to school officials, law enforcement, and other resources.
“Students and their social networks have a much better understanding of what is a threatening sort of environment than any of the rest of us, so we made this app to put it in their hands and get them proactive and engaged in safety,” said Safetime CEO and Artis Magi AI founder Richard Davis.
Davis tells 47 ABC that teens are more comfortable using an app or texting than picking up the phone to call law enforcement to report suspicious activity, and the app was designed to make that process simple, regardless of the platform the content was posted in.
“This flattens the communication so that it gets to exactly the right person to be able to take preventive steps to keep us from getting to that point where law enforcement would have to respond with weapons drawn,’ said Safetime COO and former Homeland Security Advisor Doug Fears.
“If a kid is on a gaming app and they decide, oh, this doesn’t look right, and they decide to forward that to the safe time app, then it’s about a two-second delay,” Davis said.
Davis says the app will need a population density of 30 percent of students to work as intended, which encompasses 750 students in the district. To boost engagement the app is also adding a “SafeTimeme Generator as a complementary tool within the SafeTime app, this tool is designed to house and promote the creation of memes that focus on positivity and inclusion. Via engagement with the meme generator, we hope to keep SafeTime front and center with students while also helping raise student self-esteem,” said CFO Tim Law.
Law says when working as intended students will be able to report activity, but says significant privacy safeguards have been enabled on how information is shared, and with whom, adding the intended effect will not always be law enforcement, with the districts and social services also having the option to get involved.
Students will be able to report anonymously or choose to be identified when making a report.
“It goes directly to law enforcement and then law enforcement gets to determine what to do with it. If there’s if they are walking down the street of the student, they see something suspicious or if they see something in the school like a suspicious backpack, they can take a photo and share exactly the same way
Davis tells 47ABC that the AI portion of the app has been trained on the social media posts of those who engaged in violence, learning to spot the posts that may have shown the signs months before any incidents took place, and sharing that information with law enforcement, who will have the final call.
Davis stresses for the app to succeed it must be a community effort.
“We need parents, aunts uncles, grandparents to get kids involved in this effort because this is a community-wide tool,” he said.
Davis says the AI Company Artis Magi was founded in St. Michaels and he has students in the district that it serves, so he hopes it can be a success.
Talbot County Schools Communications Director Debbie Garnder tells 47ABC they were glad to partner with the company to help them flag dangerous content ahead of any incidents or violence.
