Gun Detection Tech The Gun Detection Tech Firm Said Wouldn’t Work In NYC Subways Doesn’t Work In NYC Subways

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the another-feather-in-the-mayor's-cap dept

What are the odds.

Evolv, a gun detection tech firm contracted by the city of New York to handle fare jumping by scanning for guns, told everyone — including its investors — that deploying its tech in NYC subways wasn’t exactly a great idea. It made this statement even as Mayor Adams was telling people he was going to save the city by adding this tech to the swarm of police officers and National Guardsmen already patrolling the underground.

In an investor call on March 15, 2024, Peter George, the company’s CEO, admitted that the technology was not geared toward subway stations. “Subways, in particular, are not a place that we think is a good use case for us,” George said, due to the “interference with the railways.”

On March 28, 2024, Mayor Adams was telling the city that deploying this tech would be a historical moment in the annals of public safety… or space exploration… or something.

[Following] the death of a man who was pushed onto the subway tracks in late March, Adams announced that Evolv’s gun-detection scanners would be tested in the city’s train stations. “This is a Sputnik moment,” Adams said on March 28. “When President Kennedy said we were going to put a man on the moon.”

Weird. Someone being pushed onto subway tracks isn’t the sort of problem that can be solved with gun detection tech. And it certainly can’t be solved with gun detection tech even the CEO of the company providing the tech says won’t reliably detect guns in this particular application.

Of course, it’s possible it would not have detected guns no matter where Evolv’s scanners were placed. A prior test run at a Bronx hospital didn’t net many guns, but it did manage to generate an 85% false positive rate during the seven-month pilot program.

Given this astounding lack of success — along with the company’s admission the tech was not well-suited to handle electrical interference from subway tracks — you’d think the mayor would have started courting other government contractors. But he didn’t do that because he liked a lot of the people who worked for Evolv. Both Mayor Adams and his then-deputy mayor Philip Banks (both of whom are subjects of current FBI investigations) were NYPD officers. So was Evolv’s regional sales manager, Dominick D’Orazio. And the company’s CEO — the same one quoted above saying the tech won’t work reliably in subways — has used the company’s ties to the NYPD to pitch it to other cities and law enforcement agencies.

Evolv’s connection to the NYPD is something George, Evolv’s CEO, has used to market the company’s technology. “About a third of our salespeople were former police officers,” George said at a conference in June 2022. “The one here in New York was an NYPD cop, and he’s a really good sales guy because he understands who we’re selling to. He has the secret handshake.”

Here’s what NYC residents are paying for, mainly because Mayor Adams hasn’t met a cop-involved grift he’s not willing to support:

A pilot program testing AI-powered weapons scanners inside some New York City subway stations this summer did not detect any passengers with firearms — but falsely alerted more than 100 times, according to newly released police data.

Through nearly 3,000 searches, the scanners turned up more than 118 false positives as well as 12 knives, police said, though they declined to say whether the positive hits referred to illegal blades or tools, such as pocket knives, that are allowed in the transit system.

WTF. At best, the gun detection system detected 12 knives. At worst, the gun detection system did nothing more than sound the alarm a dozen times when fully-legal items passed through its scanners.

The mayor’s office can’t spin this, especially not now when it has much bigger problems to deal with (like a corruption investigation that seems to involve pretty much every one of Mayor Adams’ appointees). This is an objective failure. And it’s exactly the kind of failure the CEO of the Evolv made clear might be a real possibility if the tech was used in the NYC subway system.

Hopefully, this will be the end of this experiment. But who knows what might happen if Mayor Adams manages to walk away from this corruption investigation unscathed. He’s apparently willing to keep throwing money at his cop buddies despite their lack of success. And he’s the kind of cop who believes the only reason some new invasive tech hasn’t worked so far is because it hasn’t been deployed hard enough or often enough to reduce false positive percentages to a level where they might not make national headlines as quickly.

Evolv has gun detectors to sell. And, in Mayor Adams and those with the same “deploy first, evaluate later” mentality, they have a market that’s probably not nearly as limited as we might hope it would be. This stuff isn’t going away. It’s just going to get better PR and possibly a better set of customers that aren’t on the verge of having “disgraced” and “former” added to their title of “NYC Mayor.”

Filed Under: ai, eric adams, gun detection, nyc, nyc subway
Companies: evolv