New York will try gun scanners in subway to dissuade violence

NEW YORK — New York City officials announced a pilot program on Thursday to deploy portable gun scanners in the subway system, part of an effort to deter violence underground and to make the system feel safer.

The scanners will be introduced in certain stations after a legally mandated 90-day waiting period, Mayor Eric Adams said.

“Keeping New Yorkers safe on the subway and maintaining confidence in the system is key to ensuring that New York remains the safest big city in America,” said Adams, who also announced a plan to send additional outreach workers into subway stations to try to get people with mental health issues who are living in the system into treatment.

Adams said officials would work to identify companies with expertise in weapons detection technology and that after the waiting period the scanners would be instituted in some subway stations “where the NYPD will be able to further evaluate the equipment’s effectiveness.”

The scanner that Adams and police officials introduced during Thursday’s news conference in a lower Manhattan station came from Evolv, a publicly traded company that has been accused of doctoring the results of software testing to make its scanners appear more effective than they are.

Jerome Greco, supervising attorney of the digital forensics unit at the Legal Aid Society, said gun detection systems can trigger false alarms and cause panic.

“This Administration’s headstrong reliance on technology as a panacea to further public safety is misguided, costly, and creates significant invasions of privacy,” Greco said in a news release.

Adams said the city would perform its own analysis of the scanners’ accuracy.

“People may have had bad experiences with this technology,” Adams, a former transit police officer, said. “What we witnessed, it’s living up to our expectations. And we’re going to do an analysis and determine, hey is it living up to our expectations.”