The Cross Insurance Center in Bangor has installed new weapons-screening technology at its entrances that relies on artificial intelligence.
In an interview with Maine Public’s Irwin Gratz, Peter Evans, the chief executive of Xtract One technologies, said his company’s equipment is both more effective at finding weapons and less obtrusive than traditional metal detectors:
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Evans: Everyone has to divest of all the metal in their pockets, their cell phone, their watch, wallet, keys, etc., which slows down entry into a venue. In our case, using these sensors and artificial intelligence, we’re able to discern the difference between this is a cell phone, and this is a gun, and this is a knife, and only alert on those items that are of concern, such as guns or knives. Consequently, the patron entering into the venue doesn’t have to divest of all their metal, they just walk right in. And so consequently, instead of about five or six people getting into a venue per minute, on average, we might see, depending on the demographics, 25, 35, 45 people per minute getting into a venue because the bulk of them are just walking in.
Gratz: Now, your system still does require people to walk between the dual detectors. But looking at the pictures, they also appeared to be designed to be somewhat less obvious than the traditional metal detectors?
Very true. People do need to pass through the system. But with that idea of aesthetics, also, the original idea when we first thought of the company and these systems was to make them very, very covert, to have these sitting in the lobbies of a hotel, or a commercial office building, and it just looked like a planter, completely unobtrusive, and non-invasive. Now in some places, people like the physical deterrence that a metal detector presents. And so we can wrap them any way the venue wants, we can actually make them look like a metal detector accordingly.
Can you tell us what you did in Bangor?
Yes, working with Cross Insurance Arena, they’re managed by an organization called the Oak View Group, and they were using traditional walk-through metal detectors. And you can imagine in Bangor, it gets pretty cold in the winters. And you’re standing outside waiting to go through the metal detectors for a long-period of time. In the case with us side-by-side comparisons with metal detectors show that we actually detect more weapons. And in a case like that, we would get people in significantly faster — six, seven times faster than they would before. So not standing out in the cold, waiting to see the hockey game. And in fact, they’re inside in a safer environment instead of a crowd outside. And they’re getting to buy a beer faster than they would previously. So the venue is very happy with that too, because more food and bev sales.
How does your system compare with traditional metal detectors on cost?
It is more expensive, no doubt about it. Metal detectors are fairly inexpensive. Again, they’ve been around for 50-odd years. And so they’ve managed to get the economies of scale over time. As a new system, it is more expensive. But what we find is that there’s a good business model for replacing them. Let me give you a simple example. One of our customers is the Moody Center in Austin, Texas. They were using about 42 walkthrough metal detectors. Now using our system, they replaced those 42 walkthrough metal detectors with about a dozen of our system. So about 25 security guards. So you’ve reduced the number of security guards by a third. The interesting thing here is it has not caused a loss of jobs. In fact, there was a shortage of staff throughout the venue for ticketing, for concessions, for all sorts of other areas, places they wanted to apply security in the parking lots, for example, and they couldn’t apply those staff. Now they can and it’s within budget.
Are there any particular enhancements to the system that your company is working on?
What we like about our platform is the AI engines that we put on top of it allow us to be able to say yes to customers with all sorts of ideas. We’ve had retail organizations who have come to us with interesting ideas about scanning for weapons on the way in, as well as scanning for theft on the way out. We’ve had other people think about the end-to-end patron experience and we line up for tickets and we line up for bag checks and we line up for weapons detection. Can I digitally automate all of those things and make it one end-to-end solution for the customer where the patron doesn’t have to stop and wait in four different lines. And the good news is we’ve got an AI platform that allows us to say yes to customers to do those things.
