Subway gun scans eyed for summer
City subway riders will be passing through high-tech gun detectors as they enter the transit system beginning this summer, Mayor Adams announced Thursday.
Speaking at the Fulton St. train station in lower Manhattan, Adams announced the beginning of a 90-day period in which the city will seek comments and put together a plan to bring weapon detection technology to the transit system. The announcement comes amid a series of high-profile incidents across the system, including a shooting on board an A subway in Brooklyn this month.
A real-time pilot program could begin as early as July, officials said. Thursday’s announcement, the mayor said, is “the next step in our ongoing efforts to keep dangerous weapons out of our transit system.”
At the same time, the city, with a $20 million boost from the state, will be increasing its assistance to commuters suffering from a mental crisis by expanding its Subway Co-Response Outreach Teams (SCOUT), a pilot program in which medical professionals provide help to people who need treatment for severe mental illness, Adams said.
The SCOUT program will be increased to 10 teams by 2025, Adams said.
“We’re taking the next step forward in making sure our subways are even safer and make sure our riders feel safer in the transit system,” he said.
To showcase their plan, the NYPD and Adams showed how products from one of the gun detection companies, Evolv Technology, work.
After walking through the scanner, a three-second scan will determine if a commuter has a firearm on them and indicate the area they believe the weapon is.
Cops are only allowed to search the area the computer highlighted, NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Legal Matters Michael Gerber said.
“If someone choses to go through the machine to go into the transit system and the machine then alerts us to a potential weapon, we will do a search of that particular area,” Gerber said. “Our officers [are] going to do a search in that area only.”
Commuters who see the scanners have a right not to go through them and leave the transit system, but Adams hopes those with weapons roll the dice.
“I’m hoping bad guys don’t believe that they work, so we will catch them,” he joked.
Adams and his team said they are not locked into using Evolv Technology if a better company comes along in the next 90 days. The Mayor said his announcement will be a “call out” to all weapon detection companies to send in a proposal.
“This is a Sputnik moment,” Adams said. “When President Kennedy said we were going to put a man on the moon, everybody responded. Today we said we’re going to bring technology to identify guns and other dangerous weapons and our private industry will respond.”
Whatever gun detectors are used, the city will make sure they’re portable, so they can be put in communities where shootings have spiked.
“We will determine where to deploy [the equipment],” Adams said, adding that gun arrest numbers and shots fired reports will help determine where these detectors will go.
Adams ensured the detectors won’t be collecting facial recognition or biometric data on people going through the scanners. The wait time, he said, won’t be much longer than going through a turnstile and shouldn’t affect commute times.
“People will wait in line to be safe while they’re on the ‘A’ line,” Adams said.
Exactly how the city will pay for the new technology remains unclear, but Adams said it would likely be a combination of city, federal and private dollars.
In May 2022, the Daily News reported that Evolv Technology had close connections to two people who gave to a pro-Adams political action committee.
When asked why Evolv was the only tech firm mentioned by name at the mayor’s announcement, Kayla Mamelak, a spokeswoman for Adams, said that fact should no way be construed as a preference for the company and pointed to the mayor’s call Thursday for other companies with similar technology to submit their own proposals.
Mamelak said she did not know offhand what other companies the city is in contact with about the gun detection technology, though.
“We want to use these next 90 days to see if there’s other tech companies out there that do similar work,” she said. “It’s more about showing what we’re looking into.”
Adams said during his announcement that the selection process would be “extremely competitive.”
The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project slammed Adams for touting Evolv’s equipment shortly after his announcement. The group’s director, Albert Fox Cahn, said the “technology is guaranteed to slow down your commute, but it can’t keep you safe.”
Civil rights advocates said that the detection technology is not sophisticated enough to be used on a mass scale like the city subway system, where more than 4 million people ride the rails daily.
“Flooding the subway with faulty and error-prone technology is not the answer to New Yorkers’ legitimate subway safety concerns,” Michael Sisitzky, an assistant policy director at the New York Civil Liberties Union said Thursday. “Gun detection systems are notoriously ineffective, costly, and run the risk not just of violating New Yorkers’ privacy rights, but of leading to escalation and chaos when they inevitably produce false alarms.”
Jerome Greco, supervising attorney of the digital forensics unit at the Legal Aid Society said current gun detection technology “frequently trigger false alarms, which induces panic and creates situations that could result in the loss of life.”