Metal detectors equipped with artificial intelligence will soon come to subway stations in a move by the Adams administration to be responsive to a string of shootings and assaults with knives in the system, police and transit officials said Tuesday.
Mayor Eric Adams said the city will move forward with testing scanners manufactured by Massachusetts-based Evolv, a company that is under fire for potentially overstating the capabilities of its technology and is actively being investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.
The mayor said the city is working to finalize a deal with Evolv and would not specify how many scanners will enter the system or which stations will receive the hardware. Based off of initial tests, Adams said the scanners are so far “living up to our expectations.” The technology, the mayor said, will help address the “chilling effect” of recent high-profile subway crimes, including a Downtown Brooklyn shooting and a homophobic slashing in Midtown.
“Would I prefer us not having to walk through this to come onto our system? You’re darn right I do,” said Adams during a Thursday news conference at the Fulton Transit Center in Lower Manhattan. “But we have to live life the way it is and work to make it what it ought to be, and right now we have a small number of bad people that are doing bad things to good people.”
NYPD officials will begin testing Evolv scanners in the subway after a 90-day waiting period required by city law before the new technology can be tested. The scanners do not include facial recognition or biometric scanners, but do utilize artificial intelligence as the “brain and connective tissue to seamlessly integrate and process data from multiple sensors,” according to Evolv’s website.
The city did disclose how much it intends to spend on the initiative, or where the funds would come from to finance the pilot. A typical Evolv subscription can cost between $2,000 and $3,000 per scanner per month. If the city were to scale up the effort to place scanners at the more than 1,900 entrances at the subway’s 472 stations, it could cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
New Yorkers are not required to walk through a scanner, and declining to do so is not probable cause for police to conduct a search, according to Michael Gerber, the city’s deputy commissioner of legal matters. Police officers can only search someone in the area a scanner has identified as potentially concealing a weapon, Gerber added.
But equity advocates are skeptical of the technology. Jerome Greco, supervising attorney of the digital forensics unit at The Legal Aid Society, urged New Yorkers to be cautious of the “dystopian technologies” the city wants to deploy into mass transit.
“Simply put, gun detection systems are flawed and frequently trigger false alarms, which induces panic and creates situations that could result in the loss of life,” said Greco in a statement. “This Administration’s headstrong reliance on technology as a panacea to further public safety is misguided, costly, and creates significant invasions of privacy.”
Evolv scanners are already in use throughout the city, including at One Vanderbilt, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and baseball stadium Citi Field. But some transit advocates note that the scanners tend to create lines and could make it less convenient for riders to access the subway.
“Of course we want to use as many means as we can to get guns off the subway, but those can’t interfere with the service,” said Danny Pearlstein, policy and communications director for the Riders Alliance, an advocate for subway and bus riders.
“What we do know is that we can’t turn a subway station into an airport terminal,” Pearlstein added. “Metal detectors, as we know them, don’t make sense for the subway.”
Adams brushed off crowd concerns Thursday. “People will wait in line to be safe,” he said.
Caroline Spivack , 2024-03-28 20:43:48
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