An Artificial Intelligence Gun Detector in the New York City subway system: The Sputnik Moment of Mayor Eric Adams and Philip Banks III
Disney’s flagship park, Magic Kingdom, averaged over 46,000 visitors per day in 2022, according to the Orlando Sentinel. The New York City subway system, meanwhile, averaged more than 3.1 million riders on an average weekday in 2022. Maybe it’s not a perfect parallel after all.
The Mayor’s Office obtained Chitkara’s email where he mentioned that Linda Reid, the VP Security for Disney World in Florida, had known and deployed many of Chitkara’s systems. They had success in screening for weapons with Evolv Express.
New York City mayor Eric Adams set up a meeting with an artificial intelligence gun detecting company called Evolv. The brochure listed opportunities to partner together, including the Port Authority Bus Terminal, NYC schools, hospitals, and Times Square. The subway was conspicuously missing from the list.
The company that Adams wants to trust with his safety has left a trail ofControversy across the country, and critics wonder whether its technology works effectively. It has missed guns and knives in schools multiple times, thanks to its software that uses themagnetic fields and advanced sensors. The Adams administration is connected to the company’s employees and has connections to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is investigating the company’s marketing practices.
After an in-person meeting, the company’s founder made another attempt to sell his technology.
Adams said that Evolv would be tested in the city’s train stations after the death of a man on the subway tracks. “This is a Sputnik moment,” Adams said on March 28. “When President Kennedy said we were going to put a man on the moon.”
Adams tasked Philip Banks III to find a solution to the gun-detection problem. 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.)
