NYC Attempt to Scan Subway for Weapons With AI Fails Miserably as System Flooded by False Positives While Detecting Zero Actual Guns

Eat your heart out, Eric Adams.

Falsity Fallacy

New York City has been forced to reveal that its AI-powered gun-scanning pilot for its sprawling subway system was a total bust.

As CBS New York reports, experts who long opposed the Evolv startup’s AI subway scanning tech — championed by embattled Mayor Eric Adams — have been vindicated now that the pilot has been shelved.

After City & State pointed out that the New York Police Department had been silent about the month-long test, launched at the end of July, officials were forced to reveal to the website its underwhelming results: that the subway scanners had recovered exactly zero guns and 12 knives. Those figures were dwarfed by the fact that it had also turned up more than 118 false positives.

“That’s 118 additional New Yorkers who were subjected to additional stop and search, who had their privacy invaded for no reason,” Legal Aid Society attorney Diane Akerman told CBS. “The fact that the NYPD notes 12 knives but no arrests leads me to believe these were completely legal knives.”

Evolv’s scanners have proven so faulty, they even proffered false positives on multiple occasions when a specific CBS reporter walked through them in 2022 and then again earlier this year. Talk about a dud.

Spin Doctors

In spite of the apparent failure of the pilot, City Hall is still spinning it as a good thing by claiming that the tech was a crime deterrent.

“During this trial program,” an NYPD spokesperson told CBS, “there were no shootings at any subway stations where the Evolv technology was deployed.”

While that’s undeniably true, there are other likely explanations for those stats. As the New York Times found in 2022, subway violence is actually quite rare despite what some pundits would have you believe, with only one violent act for every one million rides.

Besides, the program was only deployed in 20 of New York’s 472 subway stations for a single month, which is hardly enough time to prove any deterrence effects — but definitely enough time to demonstrate how underbaked the tech is.

More on NYC’s AI failures: Eric Adams Has Been Indicted, But His Crappy Subway Robot Will Be “Redeployed”