New York City to test AI-enabled gun scanners in subway system | Artificial intelligence (AI)

[Pelican Press 0]

New York City to test AI-enabled **** scanners in subway system | Artificial intelligence (AI)

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

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

“Keeping New Yorkers safe on the subway and maintaining confidence in the system is key to ensuring that New York ******** 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 *******, 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. The company is under investigation by both the US’s trade regulator and its chief financial regulator.

The company describes its artificial intelligence-enabled scanners as deploying “safe, ultra-low frequency, electromagnetic fields and advanced sensors to detect concealed weapons”.

The Evolv CEO, Peter George,

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: “We’ve written the signatures for all the threats that are out there: all the guns that exist, all the ******, all the large tactical knives.”

A man demonstrates the Evolv weapons-detection system. Photograph: Erik Pendzich/Rex/Shutterstock

Jerome Greco, supervising attorney of the digital forensics unit at the Legal Aid Society, said ****-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?”

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City officials did not say exactly where the scanners would be installed. The device they demonstrated at the Fulton Street station beeped after a brief delay when a police officer with a holstered **** went through but was silent when officers carrying cellphones and other electronic devices passed through.

Overall, violent ****** is rare in the city’s subway system, which serves about 3 million riders a day, but there have been two recent high-profile ********* incidents. Earlier in March, a man was shot with his own **** and critically wounded during a confrontation with another passenger. Last month, one person was ******* and several others wounded when shots were fired amid a ****** between two groups on a rush-hour subway car.

There were five killings in the system last year, down from 10 the year prior, according to police. There were three homicides in the first two months of 2024.

The scanner announcement came days after a fatal shove in an East Harlem subway station on Monday once again brought the issue of subway safety to the forefront.

Also on Monday, New York City officials announced a plan to send 800 more police officers into the subway system to ****** down on fare evasion.

Before the latest surge, the NYPD had seized 17 guns from people stopped in the system this year, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority chair and CEO Janno Lieber said at a board meeting Wednesday.

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#York #City #test #AIenabled #**** #scanners #subway #system #Artificial #intelligence

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