Statement on Baltimore County Public Schools AI Weapon Detection System False Alert

October 28, 2025

On Monday, October 20, Taki Allen, a 16-year old student at Kenwood High School in Baltimore County, Maryland, was waiting for a ride home from football practice with friends when an AI-driven weapon detection system mistook a bag of Doritos in his hand for a gun. Although the Baltimore County Public Schools (BCPS) Department of School Safety quickly ruled out the alert as a false positive and accordingly did not contact law enforcement pursuant to protocol, Principal Kate Smith independently contacted the Kenwood High School School Resource Officer (SRO) to report the alert, and the SRO then contacted law enforcement. As a result, multiple police officers swarmed Taki Allen with guns drawn, detaining him and other students at gunpoint and handcuffing him behind his back on the ground. Police searched Taki Allen, found no weapon, and confirmed that the AI-system had alerted to an empty chip bag.

The Public Justice Center finds this incident – which was deeply traumatic and could easily have been fatal – to be appalling and unacceptable. Too often, biased actions taken by school administrators in the name of safety are dangerous and harmful to Black students, and make all students less safe. Adult bias shows up in their extreme reactions to the behavior of Black students, like the administrators’ and police response to Taki Allen’s chip bag.¹ This leads to disproportionate discipline and arrest of Black students.

“In an era where the federal government has all but eliminated the civil rights functions of the US Department of Education, ceasing to investigate civil rights claims or collect necessary data to disrupt unfair treatment of students, it is critical the State of Maryland holds school districts accountable for protecting children’s civil and human rights” said PJC’s executive director, Khalilah M. Harris.

Maryland State Department of Education data shows that BCPS is a deeply punitive school district that suspends far more students than any other Maryland school district.² While Black students make up only 39% of the student population of Baltimore County, 62% of suspensions are of Black students, nearly three times the rate of white students. Additionally, police in Baltimore County schools arrest Black students at a rate 2.7 times more than white students. Research repeatedly shows that police do not make schools safer.³ Instead, their presence in schools can lead to decreased graduation rates and increased future encounters with the juvenile legal system.⁴ Despite this, BCPS has invested millions of dollars into extreme surveillance of its students while cutting funding for supplies and indicating that it won’t be able to afford previously agreed upon raises for teachers.⁵

The Public Justice Center joins Associate Black Charities in calling for BCPS to:

• Conduct a transparent, independent investigation into the chain of decisions that led to this incident;
• Hold Principal Kate Smith fully accountable, including termination if warranted;
• Integrate cultural humility, de-escalation, and bias-awareness training into all administrator development;
• Provide trauma-informed support and counseling to Taki Allen and students who witnessed the event; and
• Publicly reaffirm BCPS’s commitment to equity, transparency, and student safety across the district, including a budgeted reconstitution of BCPS’s quietly dismantled Equity and Community Office.

In addition, the Public Justice Center calls on BCPS to:

• Comprehensively address its discriminatory use of school discipline and school police; and
• Decrease its investment in extreme surveillance measures and increase its investment in proven methods to improve safety such as restorative practices⁶ and social-emotional learning.⁷

Further, the Public Justice Center calls on the Maryland State Department of Education to work with BCPS in correcting its racially disproportionate discipline, policing, and surveillance practices.

For more information, contact news@publicjustice.org.

1. See Alison N. Cooke & Amy G. Halberstadt, Adultification, Anger Bias, and Adults’ Different Perceptions of Black and White Children, 35 Cognition and Emotion 7 at 1416–22 (July 17, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2021.1950127; Richard Mendel, The Real Cost of ‘Bad News’: How Misinformation is Undermining Youth Justice Policy in Baltimore, The Sentencing Project (Dec.11, 2024), https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/the-real-cost-of-bad-news-how-misinformation-is-undermining-youth-justice-policy-in-baltimore/.
2. Division of Assessment and Accountability, Suspensions By School and Major Offense Category Out-of-School Suspensions and Expulsions, MSDE (October 2025) https://www.marylandpublicschools.org/about/Documents/DCAA/SSP/20242025Student/2025-Student-Suspensions-BySchool-OutOfSchool-A.pdf; Division of Assessment, Accountability, and Performance Reporting, Enrollment by Race/Ethnicity and Gender and Number of Schools Maryland Public Schools, MSDE (January 2025) https://www.marylandpublicschools.org/about/Documents/DCAA/SSP/20242025Student/2024-2025-Enrollment-By-Race-Ethnicity-Gender-A.pdf.
3. Benjamin W. Fisher, Anthony Petrosino, Hannah Sutherland, Sarah Guckenburg, Trevor Fronius, Ivan Benitez & Kevin Earl, School-based law enforcement strategies to reduce crime, increase perceptions of safety, and improve learning outcomes in primary and secondary schools: A systematic review, 19 Campbell Systematic Reviews 4 (November 8, 2023) https://doi.org/10.1002/cl2.1360.
4. Stephanie Ann Wiley, The Amplification of Deviance Following Police Contact: An Examination of Individual and Neighborhood Factors among a Sample of Youth, Dissertation (July 2, 2014) https://irl.umsl.edu/dissertation/243; Emily K. Weisburst, Patrolling Public Schools: The Impact of Funding for School Police on Student Discipline and Long-Term Education Outcomes, 38 J. Pol’y Analysis & Mgmt. 338 (2019) https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.22116; Jeffrey Fagan and Joscha Legewie, Aggressive Policing and the Educational Performance of Minority Youth, 84 Amer. Soc’l Rev. 220 (2019) https://doi.org/10.1177/000312241982602.
5. Stephon Dingle, Baltimore County teachers express frustration as promised pay raise returns to bargaining table, Baltimore Banner (April 30, 2025) https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/baltimore-county-teachers-pay-raise-barging/. 
6. Anne Gregory & Katherine R. Evans, The Starts & Stumbles of Restorative Justice in Education: Where Do We Go From Here?, National Education Policy Center (January 2020) (“We conclude that results from case studies, district-wide correlational studies, and experimental trials convincingly demonstrate that when schools implement a restorative initiative, their out-of-school suspension rates decrease. . . . [R]estorative initiatives have promise to narrow racial disparities in suspension.”) https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Revised%20PB%20Gregory_0.pdf
7. Rebecca D. Taylor, Eva Oberle, Joseph A. Durlak & Roger P. Weissberg, Promoting positive youth development through school-based social emotional learning interventions: A meta-analysis of follow-up effects, 88 Child Development, 4, 1156-1171 (2017) https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12864