Questions and answers
What this does, what it does not, and what it costs
The questions that come up before a quote, answered the way they would be answered on a call. The ones with an uncomfortable answer are here too, near the top.
What it detects
The first four questions everybody asks, in the order they ask them.
What does OptiArms detect?
Firearms that are visible to a camera. A handgun held in the open, a long gun carried or shouldered. Detection starts at the moment the weapon is in frame and stops being useful the moment it is not.
Can it detect a gun in a backpack or under a coat?
No. A concealed weapon is invisible to a camera, and no improvement to the model changes that. Any product in this category claiming otherwise is describing something a camera cannot do.
How accurate is it?
There is no published accuracy figure here, and a single number would not mean anything across different cameras, lighting, and distances. Each site is shown its own false-alert rate, counted from the dismissals its own people recorded. An alert reports a confidence band, never a percentage.
Does it produce false alerts?
Yes. Phones, tools, prop guns, and plain shadows all get flagged sometimes. That is stated at signup, it is acknowledged in writing before detection is switched on, and the measured rate sits beside every response setting a site can change.
Is this facial recognition?
No. Nobody is enrolled, no face is matched, and no track is connected to a person between incidents. Movement is followed across frames and cameras inside a single incident and discarded after it. Identity matching is out of scope by design, not pending.
Does it work at night?
Each camera decides day or night from the image itself rather than from a clock, and carries a separate threshold set for each. A camera that has switched to infrared is read as night on the pixels, so a late sunset or a dark corridor does not put it on the wrong numbers.
Cameras and coverage
Whether the cameras already on the wall can do this, and what happens when they cannot.
Do we have to replace our cameras?
Usually not. Analogue channels behind a recorder often work, and so do most IP cameras that speak RTSP or ONVIF. Setup rates each camera against its own lens, resolution, and working distance, and tells you which ones resolve a firearm and which do not.
What happens to a camera that is not good enough?
It is refused rather than accepted at a lower standard, and a refused camera is never billed. Cameras are rated separately for rifles and handguns, because a camera that cannot resolve a pistol at twelve metres will often resolve a rifle at the same spot. It is refused only when it resolves neither.
Does our video leave the building?
No continuous video leaves. An appliance on your own network reads the streams and runs the detector there. What is uploaded is the cropped frame attached to a detection, and nothing else.
What about a colour guard rifle, or an officer's sidearm?
A suppression window covers named cameras for named hours. Every window has a required end time and a logged reason, so a window opened for a rehearsal cannot become a camera nobody is watching.
What happens when it fires
Who is told, in what order, and what the system will never decide on its own.
What happens when a firearm is detected?
Evidence builds across frames and across cameras into a confidence band, and the frame that caused it travels with the alert. The alert goes to the staff, reviewers, and agencies you chose, on a ladder you configure.
Does OptiArms call 911 for us?
The platform never dials a phone. A person on site places the call, or a monitoring agent routes an alarm to your 911 centre if you set that up. A dispatch always follows a human verdict, and no timer in the product can send police on its own.
What if nobody opens the alert?
It does not sit there. An unanswered alert widens to the whole roster, and still unanswered it asks a monitoring agent to look at the frame. Only a person acknowledging stops that ladder, and the alert escalating on its own timer never counts as somebody having answered.
Can it lock the doors?
It can signal an access-control system to secure them, if your site is wired for it and an administrator armed that action. It cannot unlock a door. There is no release command anywhere in the product, because releasing a building is a decision made by people who can see it.
Can we run a drill?
Yes, and a drill never reaches an outside agency. Every escalation provider checks for a drill before it builds a request, and the drill report afterwards states what the response actually did against what the drill declared it would test.
Cost and procurement
How the bill is shaped, and which grant programs pay for this category.
How is it priced?
Per camera per month, plus a monthly rental on the appliance that runs the analysis. Monitoring is a separate line rather than bundled into the camera rate. The current rate card is published on the pricing page.
When does a camera start costing money?
Once it has actually streamed. Declaring a camera at signup is a statement of intent, and charging before any video has arrived would be charging for coverage that does not exist. A camera rated unsuitable is never billed at all.
Can grant money pay for this?
Some programs, and not the one districts apply to most. The COPS School Violence Prevention Program funds security equipment. STOP School Violence money cannot buy cameras, and districts apply there for equipment by mistake every year.
Privacy and data
What is kept, who can reach it, and what has to be agreed separately.
Who can see our alerts?
The people on your own roster, and any law-enforcement agency you have linked, which sees a scoped view of an incident rather than your console. Nothing reaches an outside agency unless you set that up first.
Are our frames used to train the model?
Not unless you agree to it separately. Training consent defaults to off, it is granted against a typed name recorded as an acknowledgment, and revoking it stops the export. The data-processing terms treat it as its own written agreement rather than a clause inside the main one.
What about student privacy?
The student-privacy commitments are published as their own document rather than folded into the main terms. Frames are never sold, and no site, logo, or incident from a customer building is published unless that customer asks for it.
Still deciding
The pages behind the short answers, for a reader who has to write the recommendation.