New York City is turning to artificial intelligence scanners to keep guns out of its subway system, but a pilot program launched Friday has been met with skepticism from riders and threats of lawsuits from civil liberties advocates who say the searches are unconstitutional.
The Evolv scanner is a sleek weapons detector that uses artificial intelligence to search for passengers carrying guns and knives. A 30-day trial is announced here.
“It’s a great technology,” Adams said at the Fulton Center near the World Trade Center.
“Would I rather we didn’t have to be scanned? Yes,” he added. “But if you talk to the average subway rider, they’ll say they don’t want guns on the subway system, and if that means using scanners, turn on the scanners.”
Adams, a self-proclaimed “tech geek,” emphasized that the scanner is still in its experimental stage. The machines, already in use at baseball stadiums and other venues, will be deployed to a handful of stations, requiring only a small percentage of riders to pass through them. The city has not yet signed a contract with Evolv, and Adams said other companies are welcome to market their own gun-detection innovations.
The scanners are approximately 6 feet (1.8 meters) tall and feature the city’s police department logo and colorful light displays. When a weapon is detected, an alert is sent to a tablet monitored by two NYPD officers. The system isn’t supposed to sound alarms for everyday items like cellphones and laptops — although a reporter’s iPad case set off an alert on Friday.
The scanners sparked immediate protests from civil liberties advocates. The New York Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Aid Society said they would sue the city if the technology became widely available, claiming the searches violated passengers’ constitutional rights.
“City officials acknowledged that the scanners were primarily intended to counteract the ‘perception’ among some riders that they were unsafe on the subway — which was not a legitimate reason to violate the Constitution,” said CUNY attorney Daniel Lambright. Lambright said.
The scanners have also raised concerns among passengers, who say it is neither practical nor reasonable to screen millions of commuters.
“This isn’t going to work,” said 25-year-old Dre Thomas, shaking his head at the device. “It has to be at every point of the subway. I don’t see how that’s possible. It seems to me like another way to waste taxpayers’ money.
Wyatt Hotis, 29, said he thought the scanners were a good idea but “not the source of the problem” because people being pushed onto the tracks was a larger safety issue. Instead, Hotis recommended adding guardrails and barriers to the platform and adding more officers to patrol it.
Margaret Bortner, one of the first passengers to go under the scanner, said the 30-second process was painless, but she didn’t think it was necessary to be scanned at every station.
“Officials should be doing more important things,” she said.
Crime rates in the New York City subway system have declined in recent years, despite some high-profile incidents, such as a 2022 shooting on a Brooklyn train that injured 10 people. Overall, violent crime is rare on the system, and train cars and stations are generally as safe as other public spaces.
So far this year, as of July 21, subway crime is down 8% compared with the same period in 2023, police data shows. According to police, there were five homicides on the subway last year, down from 10 the year before.
Adams has long discussed the possibility of adding weapons detectors to the subway system. He said this week that “eventually every turnstile will be able to identify whether someone is carrying a gun,” but that doing so would likely require the city to deploy thousands of police officers to respond to gun alerts.
Experts have also expressed doubts about the feasibility of adding the technology to the city’s vast subway system, which includes 472 stations with multiple entrances and exits. The Fulton Center, the metro hub where the mayor spoke, illustrates the challenges of deploying detectors in a system designed to be as accessible as possible.
Multiple entrances are spread over several blocks, with dozens of turnstiles used by up to 300,000 passengers every day. During rush hour, they often sprint to catch trains. Anyone who wants to carry a firearm without going through a scanner can simply walk to another entrance or a nearby station.
According to the Daily News, Evolv CEO Peter George himself admitted that subways are “not a very good use case” for scanners.
Evolv said its scanning system uses artificial intelligence to screen up to 3,600 people per hour, quickly detecting “signatures” of guns, knives and explosives without alerting cellphones and other metal devices.
The company has faced a slew of lawsuits and federal investigations into its marketing practices in recent years. Evolv told investors last year that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission had contacted the company, and in February said the SEC had contacted the company as part of a “fact-finding investigation.”
Earlier this year, investors filed a class-action lawsuit accusing company executives of exaggerating the device’s capabilities, claiming that “Evolv cannot reliably detect knives or firearms.” The company claimed that it was becoming a false target for those “motivated to discredit the company.” Objectives of the messaging campaign.
New York City has tried a variety of security measures to ensure its massive subway system is protected. In 2005, the New York Police Department launched a pilot project to study the feasibility of using explosives detection technology in the subway.
The department then began conducting random searches of the luggage of people entering the subway system. It was also launched with much fanfare, but such bag checks, while not abandoned entirely, are now rare.
CEO Daily provides the critical context news leaders in the business world need to know. Every weekday morning, more than 125,000 readers trust CEO Daily for insights into and about the C-suite. Subscribe now.
