On May 19^th, 2021, one of my mother’s closest friends, known to me as Auntie Kelli for as long as I have been alive, was brutally stabbed at the Union Square train station. A 22-year-old came up to her as she was waiting for her train and hacked at her neck and shoulders.

If not for the Good Samaritan that rushed to help her, she very well could have died that day.

This is just one example of a growing fear for New Yorkers. As of March 2024, only 49% of New York City residents feel safe on the subway during the day, and that already low number plummets to 22% at night. Even if you don’t know someone who has been harmed or harassed on the subway, then it’s not difficult to turn on the daily news and see video of it for yourself.

Considering this uneasy feeling among New Yorkers, the Adams administration decided to rub salt in the wound and roll out a disastrous new pilot program. In July of this year, Adams announced the roll-out of Evolv scanners for a 30-day period in select NYC subway stations (disclosure: the author’s relative is a senior software engineer at Evolv). Evolv’s metal detectors use artificial intelligence to autonomously identify potential contraband like guns and knives while ignoring common items like phones or keys. When contraband is identified, police are notified on special Evolv tablets. Evolv prides itself on being just as effective as traditional metal detectors but without any of the  lengthy lines, and it is already used in places like sporting venues.

Evolv markets itself as the natural evolution of the metal detector, but the problems with the company are numerous. First, much like the mayor himself, it cannot help but get embroiled in legal trouble. It is a) being sued in a class action lawsuit because it “does not reliably detect knives or guns”, b) being investigated by the FTC for false advertising (e.g. advertising the product works when it doesn’t), c) being sued by a student in Utica, NY who was stabbed by another student who passed through an Evolv detector, and d) being investigated by the SEC for undisclosed reasons (though I can take a guess).

Second, the scanners just don’t actually seem to work. One Bronx hospital used Evolv for over seven months and found that 85% of all positives were false, and the majority of actual positives were just from police officers passing through. If 85% of positives are false, then that means that a positive is more likely to be negative than positive. At that rate, Evolv might have better luck flagging people at random.

One unlikely ally to the critics of Evolv’s subway pilot is the CEO of Evolv, Peter George. In a call to investors, he said that Evolv was not geared toward public transit. Adams was apparently swayed after hearing about the company’s partnership with Disney, ignoring that the Subway receives 67 times the daily visitors than Disney’s flagship Magic Kingdom.

Even if Evolv were a perfect piece of technology, it would still raise serious concerns about privacy rights. Both the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Aid Society of New York have both vowed to sue the city if the scanners are widely rolled out. They argue that these scanners would not only increase congestion and delays to subway riders but would put riders, specifically poor people of color, at undue risk from the panic and confusion would come from being flagged by one of these detectors. In exchange for riders’ privacy being violated, they would get a whole lot of nothing, since these scanners don’t actually make anyone safer and only make life more difficult for everyone.

These scanners aren’t just bad at their jobs, they would also cost the taxpayer a lot of money to be bad at their jobs. Each Evolv detector costs $2000-3000 a month to run (why they run on a subscription model is beyond me). To do some napkin math, say two of these detectors were installed at all 472 subway stations for a year at $2000 a month (a conservative estimate of the total cost which doesn’t even include the salaries of the police officers necessary to operate the device). This would cost $22.6 million dollars a year, nearly the same as the $23.6 million dollars the city needed to save so badly it closed libraries on Sunday. Twenty-two million dollars, all thrown away on a device that violates people’s rights and doesn’t even work.

The NYPD has just released the results of its pilot program. Over the month-long test, Evolv scanners detected zero guns. Of the 3,000 scans it conducted, 130 were positive, and of those, 118 were false positives (a false positive rate of 90%).

Eric Adams makes a point of calling himself a “tech geek,” and as Mayor, he makes it New York’s problem. With something as serious as safety from violent crime on the line, New Yorkers deserve better than a mayor willing to humor such astoundingly unpromising technology. The fact that Evolv scanners were ever considered is a travesty and a dark stain on Eric Adams’ already blemished tenure as mayor.

Christopher Asma is a senior majoring in political science and minoring in public policy and computer science at Hunter College. Over his college career, Christopher has cultivated a passion for public service and government by working for multiple state and local representatives, the Mayor’s office, City agencies, and most recently for US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Through Hunter College, he has served as a member of Hunter Has Heart—an organization which seeks to combat food insecurity on campus—and as a Pride Policy Fellow—a selective fellowship which gives LGBTQ students the opportunity to work on LGBTQ policy under LGBTQ elected officials and organizations like the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. In addition, he is the Director of Partnerships for Paragon Policy Fellowship, a non-profit which pairs college students eager to explore the world of technology policy with state and local governments looking to develop their tech capacity.