NYC Subway AI Weapons Scanners Yield High False Positive Rate and Detect No Guns in Month-Long Pilot Test

October 23, 2024

For a month-long pilot test in September 2024, New York City deployed AI-equipped weapons scanners. Although no weapons were detected, the system yielded 118 false positives, indicating potential individuals suspected of carrying weapons with no actual gun detections.

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Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.692, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.5 — similarity 0.658, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.655, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: new-york-city-government
Alleged developer: evolv-technology
Alleged harmed parties: new-york-city-subway-riders

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/831

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.