alARMed

Inspiration

“Mom, I love you.” A phrase uttered over the phone that once sparked indescribable warmth in the hearts of parents now sends chills down one’s spine in the wake of school shootings. In the 2021-22 school year, 188 school shootings, breaking the record set by the year before, were reported according to the National Center for Education Statistics’s (NCES) and this number, unfortunately, is only predicted to grow. School shootings have increased 163% since 2020 and 1,900% since 2010 as reported by the K1 School Shooting Database. In a comprehensive school shooting study, the Secret Service and Department of Education found that  93% of school shooters planned the attack in advance. In 2018, Nikolas Cruz, responsible for the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, posted on Youtube about his desire to be a >“professional school shooter” alongside pictures of him posing with guns. More recently, Anthony Ramos, revealed on social media about his plans that would >“put him all over the news” prior to committing the Uvalde school shooting in 2022. The trend of perpetrators posting concerning and cryptic messages on social media before committing crimes is hard to ignore and is likely to continue. Detecting these warning signs before it’s too late and notifying individuals in potentially targeted areas can help prevent school shootings and save lives. Existing solutions to this problem involve schools hiring social media surveillance companies to monitor the accounts of students, but their successes remain questionable and have been met with concerns of violating one’s privacy. Having all experienced the encroaching fear that one day attending school may be our last, we began this project as a concerted effort to take preventative action towards the devastating school shootings nationwide. Many perpetrators of school shootings post on social media leading up to the crime. However, these early warning signs are often ignored and not brought to the attention of the police department early enough despite being key indicators of their intent to inflict harm. We intend to change this by creating a web scraper that detects the severity of potentially fatal posts and notifies law enforcement and the local community to take precautionary measures in advance.

What it does

This tool scrapes through the text of twitter posts and flags tweets that can imply an intent to commit harm. It analyzes the language and determines the severity of the words. The tool is intended to be an added feature that can be adopted by social media platforms including Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and more. This information would then be sent to local departments of security to intervene with the potential offender and send alerts to the surrounding community to seek shelter.

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we were overwhelmed by the daunting nature of this project, as the idea of parsing entire social media feeds seemed unfeasible due to the fact that social media platforms are used by a vast number of people. While we were excited about the project for pushing us outside our comfort zones, we were doubtful that we could accomplish it and struggled to come up with alternate ideas. Fortunately, our mentor encouraged us to continue with the idea and suggested that we create a Chrome Extension to parse through webpages relatively easily as an initial proof of concept, thus giving us the confidence to proceed despite our apprehension.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

Through this project, we learned that the hardest part of the development process is not necessarily the programming itself, but creating and evolving an idea that is well thought out. Coming up with a creative and impactful project takes critical thinking and an understanding of key world issues along with the capabilities of software to address them. Beyond that, thinking through the steps of the project in a technical sense can be confusing to navigate, especially for beginners. However, we learned that curiosity, collaboration and the willingness to ask for help are key for success.