New York Will Test Gun-Detecting Technology in Subway, Mayor Adams Says

Mayor Eric Adams on Thursday announced that New York City planned to test technology to detect guns in its subway system as officials seek to make transit riders feel safe after a deadly shoving attack earlier in the week.

The technology pilot, which would not begin for several months, would roll out in a few stations, Mr. Adams said at a news conference, and could help provide a sense of security among transit riders, who have been unnerved recently by several high-profile acts of violence.

The new technology will be introduced in partnership with Evolv Technology, a Massachusetts start-up, Mr. Adams said.

The city has no contract with Evolv, and the announcement was meant to be an open call to any firm with similar products, a city spokeswoman said, clarifying the mayor’s earlier comments.

In 2022, Evolv expressed concerns to City Hall that its technology could cause bottlenecks if used in the subway system, according to a person involved in the discussions.

“What I know about technology is the first version continues to get better,” Mr. Adams said in response to questions from reporters on Thursday.

Evolv’s devices look like the metal detectors often found at courthouses and baseball stadiums. The company says that the devices are programmed with the “signatures” of certain items, which allows them to detect weapons.

“Random acts of violence play on the psyche of New York,” Mr. Adams said. “We are going to evolve in a way to ensure that technology becomes part of the public safety apparatus.”

But civil liberties advocates questioned whether more surveillance equipment in a transit system that has already added thousands of cameras, as well as bag checks staffed by police officers and the National Guard, was an answer to safety concerns. And some technology experts said the machines promoted by the mayor were unreliable.

“The technology is guaranteed to slow down your commute, but it can’t keep you safe,” said Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a privacy and civil rights group based in New York.

A spokeswoman for Evolv, Alexandra Smith Ozerkis, said the company’s technical team was “working with the N.Y.P.D. security experts to understand how and where our technology can best be used to align with their security and operations objectives.”

She added that the technology “continues to improve, both in its detection and its ability to operate in more challenging environments.”

Nikita Ermolaev, a researcher with the Pennsylvania-based surveillance industry group IPVM, noted the high cost of the devices. Leasing a single unit can run about $125,000 over a four-year contract, he said. By comparison, he added, conventional metal detectors can typically be purchased outright for less than $10,000 each.

City officials on Thursday did not say how much they intended to spend on the pilot program.

The announcement of the new initiative comes days after a man was shoved in front of a train in East Harlem and killed. The man charged in the attack, Carlton McPherson, 24, had a history of committing violent acts against others and his family said he struggled with mental illness.

At the news conference on Thursday, the mayor also announced that the city would soon begin hiring clinicians as part of a $20 million investment from the state to deploy teams of mental health workers in the subway system.

Mr. Adams stressed that the chances of being victimized in the subway were remote.

There are approximately six felonies each day in the city’s subway system, which averages four million daily riders, Mr. Adams said, but “if they don’t feel safe, we are not accomplishing our task.”

Overall, crimes in the subway are up 4 percent so far this year compared with the same period last year, police data shows. There were five homicides in the system last year, down from 10 the previous year.

But city and state leaders have often said that they are as concerned about the perception of safety as they are about actual crime rates. Earlier this month, a confrontation on an A train ended in violence when a man took a gun from another man who was threatening him and shot him in the head. Last month, a subway worker was slashed at the Rockaway Avenue station in Brooklyn.

Some transit advocates expressed support for the experiment.

“If technology can help keep weapons off platforms and trains without delaying service — a big ‘if’ — riders will gain peace of mind,” said Danny Pearlstein, a spokesman for the Riders Alliance, an advocacy group in New York.

The gun-detection initiative is the latest high-tech solution Mr. Adams has unveiled to address public safety concerns. Since taking office, the mayor, who has described himself as a tech geek, has unveiled a robot to patrol Times Square, expanded the use of drones and boasted about the city’s use of a robotic dog to assist in emergency situations.

The Legal Aid Society asked that the Police Department’s use of surveillance technology be investigated last year, arguing that it was violating a city law requiring it to disclose how new technology is being used and how data is protected.

In a statement on Thursday, Jerome Greco, supervising attorney with the group’s digital forensics unit, said the administration’s continued reliance on technology to address safety was “misguided, costly, and creates significant invasions of privacy.”

The mayor’s announcement on Thursday marked the start of a required 90-day waiting period during which the public can weigh in on the new technology and its proposed use. Mr. Adams said city officials posted online on Thursday the policies that would govern the use of the new surveillance equipment. Officials said the devices would be deployed after the waiting period.

Mr. Adams’s announcement on Thursday is the latest ramp-up of an expansive effort to keep the system safe.

The subway is critical to New York’s rebound from the pandemic. That has made rider concerns a top priority for officials, who have deployed wave after wave of law enforcement officials, mental health workers and surveillance cameras into the system over the past two years.

The subway is patrolled by thousands of law enforcement officials that include National Guard soldiers, State Police troopers and city police officers. Officers had already been working an extra 1,200 daily overtime shifts within the subway when officials roughly doubled their presence by deploying an additional 1,000 officers earlier this year. Then another 1,000 National Guardsmen, state troopers and transit officers were added this month, and 800 more police officers this week.

Teams of health care workers have been sent to help homeless people and remove them from the subway, sometimes forcibly. And thousands of surveillance cameras have been installed in the past two years, adding up to a total of about 16,000 in the system. By the end of this year, every train car will be equipped with them, M.T.A. officials have said.

Transit leaders have also installed structural features in an effort to make riders feel safe. Officials are testing new fare gates to stop turnstile jumpers and metal platform barriers to prevent riders from falling onto tracks, and they plan to add brighter lights in the system to make system feel less claustrophobic and to help capture better video using the subway’s cameras.

Dana Rubinstein contributed reporting. Alain Delaquérière contributed research.