A pilot program testing AI-powered weapons scanners inside some New York City subway stations this summer did not detect any passengers with firearms — but falsely alerted more than 100 times.
Earlier this year, investors filed a class-action lawsuit, accusing company executives of overstating the devices’ capabilities and claiming that “Evolv does not reliably detect knives or guns.”
It’s fraud. The company knows it’s unreliable and the investors know it’s unreliable, I wonder why NYC is still going to expand the trial run? 🤔
[Mayor] Adams has touted the Massachusetts-based company since taking office in 2022.
In total, there were 118 false positives — a rate of 4.29%.
Earlier this year, investors filed a class-action lawsuit, accusing company executives of overstating the devices’ capabilities and claiming that “Evolv does not reliably detect knives or guns.”
I mean, in terms of performance, I'd be more concerned about the false positive rate than the false negative rate, given the context. Like, if you miss a gun, whatever. That's at worst just the status quo, which has been working. Some money gets wasted on the machine. But if you are incorrectly stopping more than 1 in 25 New Yorkers from getting on their train, and apply that to all subway riders, that sounds like a monumental mess.
With how trigger happy police are, the false positives would lead to more deaths than they prevent. And police would claim it's justified because the machine told them so.
Facial recognition confirmed he was a criminal and the scanner confirmed he had a gun! Of course we opened fire instantly. How could we have known it was just some guy with a water bottle?
The article links an article from March '24 talking about the introduction of these devices that contains this part:
The scanner that Adams and police officials introduced during Thursday’s news conference in a lower Manhattan station came from Evolv, a publicly traded company that has been accused of doctoring the results of software testing to make its scanners appear more effective than they are.
So they could never be trusted but were still allowed to proceed.
Look, we can either look at facts and check the claims of that company that we're going to invest a lot of money into, or we can accept their bribe and move on. It's all about efficiency.
I saw a dude jogging up the stairs and his gun fell out of his hoody sweats. He looked at it for a second and the picked it up and put it on his hoody like it was his phone.
We have this ridiculous system at my work. Knives are prohibited, but get through all the time, tape measures and water bottles really piss it off though.
"Now you see, my boss allows the knives because he's not a woke. The reason your office doesn't want you to have the knives is because the knives give off natural ALPHA digital testosterone signals, especially colloidal silver knives made from gold. These ALPHA signals interrupt the 5G signal in the office chairs at your work. The chairs use the 5G to send wireless vaccines directly into your genitals and that can make you all trans DEI CRTS! This is why my boss, who's also the local county republican chapter president, has to hand inspect all of our genitals (and out children's) when we enter or leave the office each day. To make sure that rogue signals didn't get us. Careful out there snowflake."
To be fair, I don't think a state is supposed to make laws that take away constitutional rights though. It'd be like a state making a law taking away your freedom of speech, I don't think that's supposed to be allowed with state rights and all