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Back in March, Mayor Eric Adams and New York City Police Department (NYPD) Commissioner Edward A. Caban announced that officials were gearing up to install several gun detectors and scanners throughout the city's subway system in an effort to fight crime.
Fast-forward to today and New Yorkers will soon notice even more scanners underground, all equipped with artificial intelligence.
During a press conference at the Fulton Transit Center earlier this week, Adams reveals that the novel technology will be deployed across “a few locations” within the next “few days.” No details regarding where, exactly, the machines will be installed have been revealed.
A few months ago, Adams basically put out a call for "emerging technologies" that could aid in weapon detection in the transit system but the politician didn't announce which option he has settled on.
Critics believe that the new technologies amount to an invasion of privacy and may even lead to delays and human congestion.
The other side of the argument involves data indicating crime levels have fallen below pre-pandemic norms.
“We are breaking the cycle of crime in our subway system” the Mayor said during the press conference. “If you take out the first two years of the pandemic, when no one was on the system, our system is now the safest in over 14 years.”
The development likely has to do with a variety of factors that go beyond the debut of gun detectors, including Governor Kathy Hochul's decision to deploy nearly 1,000 National Guard members and police officers to check people's bags on the subway.
Around the same time, the Mayor also announced the hiring of clinicians to help “connect people with untreated severe mental illness in the subways to mental health treatment and care.”
Given the statistically proven success of past mitigation efforts, we can only imagine things will only continue to improve.