Why Nevada casinos won’t use a new gun-detection system being used in other states

Travis Thompson, director of compliance for the Muskogee Nation Gaming Enterprise in Tulsa, Oklahoma, said it’s believed to be the first casino property to install the ZeroEyes digital detection gun-finding system in the United States.

But the innovative weapons detection system wouldn’t be allowed in Nevada casinos, an industry expert said, because gaming regulations prohibit third parties from monitoring casino security camera video, an essential part of how ZeroEyes works.

“Being in the entertainment industry and with the things going on around the world, active shooter scenarios are more frequent, and that’s a bad thing,” Thompson said. “We actually had one hit kind of close to home to us. It was at a local hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where an active shooter started in the parking lot and then moved inside of the hospital facility and it really kind of opened our eyes. It’s (the hospital) about a mile from our current casino that we have there.”

After the mass shooting at Mandalay Bay into the Route 91 Harvest Festival seven years ago, Muscogee officials decided to be proactive in preventing a disaster and began a search for a solution that didn’t involve the intrusive use of metal detection arches at a casino entry.

“ZeroEyes at the time kind of fit our bill of what we were looking for,” Thompson said. “It’s an AI-based machine learning detection software tied to a huge database of guns. It’s constantly using the camera feeds as a secondary stream to send that to an AI server.”

Because ZeroEyes monitoring systems are viewed remotely and not onsite at the casino, the system would not be allowed in Nevada, according to Rick Vonfeldt, president of the Las Vegas Security Chiefs Association and the vice president of security at Caesars Palace.

Impressed with technology

“I was impressed with the technology,” Vonfeldt said. “ZeroEyes performed a demonstration for our association a few weeks ago at the Horseshoe and about 80 of our members got a chance to see it operate.”

The system was impressive enough to administrators of the Regional Transportation Commission to install a ZeroEyes system at RTC transit centers to monitor passengers boarding buses with weapons.

“RTC prides itself on its ability to identify transportation challenges and implement solutions,” RTC CEO MJ Maynard said in a statement to the Review-Journal in June just after installation. “Tens of thousands of people depend on our transit system every day, and we continually look for ways to improve their safety and security.”

“The ZeroEyes system requires cameras to be monitored and if a weapon is detected, a call is made for officers onsite to investigate,” Vonfeldt said.

Another casino security expert said in addition to the regulatory issue, a system like ZeroEyes may have other logistical problems because once a weapon is detected, security officers want to take immediate action to intercept the individual and precious seconds are spent matching the found weapon to a database to determine what officers are up against.

“They have some limitations to how those analytics work, but generally speaking, when you talk about analytics of this type, it’s nearly impossible for human eyes, when they’re monitoring multiple cameras, to even pick any of this stuff up,” said Joel Kisner, a retired Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department officer who founded and now operates Pinnacle Consulting and Advisors.

Won’t catch everything

“So, ZeroEyes won’t give you 100 percent detection. There are things they’ll miss. That’s within the analytics,” he said.

“Maybe there’s resolution issues. There’s blending of the background, so like a black gun over black clothing. ZeroEyes has issues with when a gun is pointed at a 90-degree angle at one of the cameras, it has a hard time picking that up because it doesn’t have enough features in the gun and the smaller the gun, the harder it is to get the alert. So under the old way you’d have humans sitting down looking at a bank of televisions, trying to identify what they need to pay attention to. And a lot of things get missed just because it’s really hard for a human to watch one screen for extended periods of time, let alone multiple. Those analytics make it a little bit easier.”

But Thompson and Muscogee are pleased with the system’s performance so far and noted that ZeroEyes wasn’t designed with the casino industry in mind — most of the company’s customers are schools, and in commercial and government settings in 40 states nationwide.

Thompson said he couldn’t discuss the cost of the system and each individual system varies based on several factors, including the number of cameras monitored.

“The way our system is set up, the ZeroEyes operation center notifies our tribal police, our local 911 centers and a mass notification goes out to employees and management that allows us to react faster,” he said.

Contact Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3893. Follow @RickVelotta on X.