Gun Detection Tech Co.: This Won’t Work In Subways; NYC Mayor: We’re Putting It In The Subways!
Oh, man. There’s so much going on here. The headline is only part of it.
We’ll get to it (and through it) as efficiently as possible but expect multiple stops along the way. Georgia Gee’s reporting on this for Wired is devastating. There’s so much stupidity and wrongness going on here, the article almost reads like extremely dark satire.
A little background: for whatever reason, the current mayor and law enforcement officials believe the subways are more dangerous than ever, possibly because they’ve completely forgotten the solid two-decade run of horrific crime that began in the 1970s and only began declining to current rates in the mid-1990s.
Then there’s the transit authority, which seems to believe that it’s dealing with an epidemic of fare-jumping — one never before witnessed by an agency suffering from the same sort of long-term memory loss.
This has culminated in calls for AI to do everything from recognizing fare jumpers to detecting weapons carried by paying passengers and fare jumpers alike. The state government also surged some National Guard troops to man the perimeter (and interior), giving riders the added bonus of police state vibes as they headed towards certain doom by entering a subway car.
History has been forgotten, replaced by histrionics. Sure, it’s almost spelled the same but only one has any footing in reality.
And speaking of reality, this is where the mayor begins to detach from it. Mayor Eric Adams wants to test-drive gun detection AI created by a company called Evolv in New York subways. And he wants to do it despite company officials making it clear its AI will not perform well under these circumstances.
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.”
Nonetheless, this is the product Mayor Adams prefers. And it’s not entirely his fault. The company’s CEO may have been brutally honest about his tech’s chances in an undesirable environment, but the company’s PR reps were far less concerned. In fact, they were downright cheery, proclaiming Evolv to be a “mission-driven company” that welcomed the opportunity to fail publicly during a test drive in the United States’ most-used mass transit system.
That cheeriness also downplays previous tests of Evolv’s gun detection system in New York City, which haven’t exactly gone well.
Evolv’s technology was used to screen visitors in a city-run Bronx hospital, where a man had been shot inside the emergency room in January 2022. This wasn’t very successful—the scanners produced false positives 85 percent of the time during the seven-month pilot.
So, here we have a product that didn’t function well in an environment that had never been referred to by Evolv’s CEO as non-optimal. And we have a direct statement from the CEO that seems to suggest he’d rather test this tech anywhere else but the NYC subway system.
And then we have the mayor, who has ignored all of this to portray this tech roll-out as win not just for New Yorkers, but possibly for all mankind. I am not even kidding.
Despite this, 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.”
Jesus. I could probably do 10,000 words on the statement alone. I won’t. But I’m still going to do several.
Where do you start? Mayor Adams comparing himself to one of the most beloved presidents/starfuckers to ever hold office? The comparison of looking for guns on a subway to one of the greatest achievements ever in the human race?
How about the fact that the Space Race was originally about asserting dominance? That the space program became more useful scientifically doesn’t erase its origin as a dick-measuring contest between us and the Red Menace. We needed to show them we could do everything better, if only to keep the mutually-assured-destruction temperatures down as much as possible during the Cold War.
Is the mayor comparing subway scofflaws to the USSR? Is he insinuating that ensuring the safety of subway passengers is on par with putting US boots on the lunar ground?
What would installing more metal detectors be portrayed as? Sending animals into orbit? Or does Mayor Adams think that might be a bad idea? After all, police officers are at least as willing to kill dogs as commie scientists.
Or is it this: does he consider AI policing of mass transit a similar scientific achievement? “If we can put a man on the moon, surely we can put an algorithm in a turnstile!” What even the fuck.
And does the mayor really want to detect all the guns? Let’s not forget (as Mayor Adams surely has), this city loves a good guy with a gun. Bernie Goetz was treated as a hero for going all vigilante in a subway car. If you detect those guns, you might find yourself on the wrong side of history. (But that probably doesn’t matter when you can’t even be bothered to remember it.)
Self-aggrandizement aside, there’s probably another reason Mayor Adams is so hot for a product even the company’s CEO expects to disappoint in these conditions. The short answer is Adams like himself, likes cops, and likes anyone willing to let him still be (sort of) a cop while he’s officially the mayor. More great report from Wired’s Georgia Gee:
Back in 2022, Adams tasked New York’s deputy mayor, Philip Banks III, with finding a gun-detection solution. Before joining the administration, he served as NYPD’s chief of department, but resigned in 2014 amid a federal bribery and corruption investigation in which he was later named as an unindicted coconspirator. (Banks was never charged.)
While Adams said in May 2022 that he found Evolv online, Ozerkis from Evolv tells WIRED that the NYPD had contacted Evolv “to explore and test the possibility of using our screening solution around the city as part of their multi-pronged plan to curb violent crime.”
There was a lot of overlap with former members of the NYPD. Adams and Banks came up together as police officers—as did a then-account-executive of Evolv, also name-dropped by Chitkara in the email to the mayor’s staff. Dominick D’Orazio, who had been Evolv’s sales manager in the northeast US before being promoted to regional manager in April, was a commander in Brooklyn South whose reporting line included Banks—who was, at the time, deputy chief of patrol for Borough Brooklyn South. (Banks has denied meeting D’Orazio in his capacity as an Evolv employee.)
Yeah, it’s all deeply incestuous. And, because of that, it’s deeply stupid. The tech has failed frequently, including its deployments in schools. It’s gun detection tech that apparently can’t detect guns. But because the mayor and his buddies are deeply involved, it’s being portrayed as the next best thing to martial law by someone currently being completely consumed by his own hubris.