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In February 2022, a meeting was set up between New York City mayor Eric Adams’ team and an artificial intelligence gun-detection company called Evolv. An email thread from Evolv representatives included an accompanying brochure, which listed opportunities to partner together: in the Port Authority Bus Terminal, NYC schools, hospitals, and gathering places such as Times Square. One area conspicuously missing from the list, though, was the subway.
After an in-person meeting a few days later, Evolv cofounder Anil Chitkara made another attempt to sell the company’s technology—through name-dropping.
“As I mentioned, Linda Reid, VP Security for Walt Disney World (Florida) has known us since 2014 and deployed many of our systems at the Parks and Disney Springs,” Chitkara wrote in a February 7 email to the Mayor’s Office, obtained by WIRED. “They’ve had success screening for weapons with Evolv Express … There may be some interesting parallels to how you are thinking about everyone’s role in security."
The comparison of safety in NYC to that in Disney World apparently helped to persuade the Adams team. A couple of weeks later, Evolv’s technology was used to screen visitors in a city-run Bronx hospital, where a man had been shot inside the emergency room in January 2022. This wasn’t very successful—the scanners produced false positives 85 percent of the time during the seven-month pilot.
If Evolv’s accuracy in a hospital was low, its accuracy in NYC subway stations may be worse. In an investor call on March 15, 2024, Peter George, the company’s CEO, admitted that the technology was not geared toward subway stations. “Subways, in particular, are not a place that we think is a good use case for us,” George said, due to the “interference with the railways.”
Despite this, following the death of a man who was pushed onto the subway tracks in late March, Adams announced that Evolv’s gun-detection scanners would be tested in the city’s train stations. “This is a Sputnik moment,” Adams said on March 28. “When President Kennedy said we were going to put a man on the moon.”
Alexandra Smith Ozerkis, an Evolv representative, tells WIRED that when the company developed Evolv Express, its flagship product launched in 2019, they “did not do so with the NYC subway system in mind. That said, we are a mission-driven company, and when we are asked to test our technology in a new environment, we are happy to do so.”
However, the company that Adams wants to trust with the safety of New Yorkers has left a trail of controversies across the country—and critics wonder whether its technology works effectively. Its software, which uses “electromagnetic fields and advanced sensors” to detect weapons such as guns and knives, has missed them multiple times, particularly in schools. Yet neither this nor the recent disclosure that the US Securities and Exchange Commission has initiated a fact-finding investigation of Evolv (which follows a 2023 probe by the Federal Trade Commission over the company's marketing practices) has deterred the Adams administration, which has connections to the company’s employees who previously worked for the New York Police Department—something the company was keen to stress in its pitch.
Mixed Company
Back in 2022, Adams tasked New York’s deputy mayor, Philip Banks III, with finding a gun-detection solution. 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.)
While Adams said in May 2022 that he found Evolv online, Ozerkis from Evolv tells WIRED that the NYPD had contacted Evolv “to explore and test the possibility of using our screening solution around the city as part of their multi-pronged plan to curb violent crime.”
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There was a lot of overlap with former members of the NYPD. Adams and Banks came up together as police officers—as did a then-account-executive of Evolv, also name-dropped by Chitkara in the email to the mayor’s staff. Dominick D’Orazio, who had been Evolv’s sales manager in the northeast US before being promoted to regional manager in April, was a commander in Brooklyn South whose reporting line included Banks—who was, at the time, deputy chief of patrol for Borough Brooklyn South. (Banks has denied meeting D’Orazio in his capacity as an Evolv employee.)
Evolv’s connection to the NYPD is something George, Evolv’s CEO, has used to market the company’s technology. “About a third of our salespeople were former police officers,” George said at a conference in June 2022. “The one here in New York was an NYPD cop, and he’s a really good sales guy because he understands who we’re selling to. He has the secret handshake.”
David Cohen, former NYPD deputy commissioner of intelligence, also sits on Evolv’s Security Advisory Board.
The Mayor’s Office has been keen to stress that it is not set on Evolv being a permanent fixture. “To be clear, we have NOT said we are putting Evolv technology in the subway stations,” Kayla Mamelak, deputy press secretary of the Mayor’s Office, tells WIRED in an email. “We said that we are opening a 90-day period to explore using technology, such as Evolv, in our subway stations.”
Civil rights and technology experts have argued that utilizing Evolv’s scanners in subway stations is likely to be futile. “This is Mickey Mouse public safety,” says Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a privacy advocacy organization. “This is not a serious solution for the largest transit system in the country.”
Moreover, deploying the company’s technology might not just be ineffective—it’s also likely to add more police officers to the daily rhythms of New Yorkers’ lives, heightening Adams’ pro-cop agenda. The NYC subway has 472 stations. “That is roughly 1,000 subway station entrances,” explains Sarah Kaufman, director of the New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation. “That means that Evolv would have to be at every single entrance in order to be effective, and that of course would require monitoring.”
According to the draft policy posted by the NYPD, the process surrounding weapons-detection technology in the subway is extremely vague, and still relies heavily on police officers. “The checkpoint supervisor will determine the frequency of passengers subject to inspection (for example, every fifth passenger or every tenth passenger),” the document reads. It will also be based on “available police personnel on hand to perform inspections.”
The NYC subway has an estimated 3.6 million daily riders. Stopping every 10th passenger would mean 360,000 searches a day.
“It’s going to mean that people are routinely going to have to go through invasive and inconvenient searches,” says Cahn. “What’s really emblematic here is that the city keeps trying to go for security measures that are highly visible, even when they’re highly ineffective.”
School Supplies
In the email thread to the NYC officials who attended the meeting, Chitkara touted Evolv’s successful deployment in schools. But there, too, the scanners have failed to detect weapons and guns on multiple occasions. While the Adams administration was being persuaded to pilot the technology, internal emails obtained from a large school district that uses Evolv’s technology illustrate how everyday objects were being mistaken by the scanners.
“I know the simple solution is to tell kids not to use binders but rather regular notebooks,” Jacqueline Barone, principal of Piedmont Middle School, part of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina, wrote at the end of 2022. “But it hurts my soul to have to tell kids or teachers that certain supplies can’t be used because the scanners mistake them for weapons.”
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In mid-April, the school district’s chief operating officer announced at a conference panel with an Evolv executive in Las Vegas that they were “eliminating” metal three-ring binders.
“As we transition into the next school year, teachers will utilize other alternatives for classroom supplies,” Jessica Saunders, a Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools spokesperson, tells WIRED in an email. She also says student laptops most often alert the weapons detection system.
Meanwhile, the company is currently being sued by a high school student in upstate New York who alleges that Evolv misrepresented its technology and is responsible for failing to detect the large knife that was used to stab him.
A class action was also recently filed by Evolv’s shareholders who claim that the company made misleading statements in violation of securities law that led to huge financial losses, while also claiming that the technology “does not reliably detect knives or guns.”
“Evolv Express systems are designed to configure various levels of a security profile with different sensitivity settings, which are selected by the customer, based on their specific needs and events,” Ozerkis tells WIRED. “That doesn’t mean our technology doesn’t work; it means the security professionals in charge of keeping that environment safe made the decision that they need to screen for different—or a wider variety—of threats.”
“Getting the Word Out”
For now, as part of NYC’s pilot program, there is that mandatory waiting period. This is likely to begin in late June and will last 90 days. According to the Mayor’s Office, the city will also explore the use of other technologies and companies.
“We are conducting outreach to several tech companies and the mayor even said that the point of the presser was to get the word out,” Mamelak from the Mayor’s Office says.
ZeroEyes, a competitor of Evolv, is one company possibly being considered. Like Evolv, the company has been represented by lobbyist Mike Klein, who lobbied the Mayor’s Office on ZeroEyes’ behalf in 2022 and 2023, according to disclosure documents. (Klein tells WIRED he no longer represents the company.)
So far, ZeroEyes hasn’t been wholly successful in the transport space: The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority quietly ended its pilot program with the company in December. A representative from ZeroEyes tells WIRED they could not confirm whether their technology would be piloted in New York.
Once the waiting period begins, the public will have 45 days to submit comments on the use of the technology before they are considered by the Mayor’s Office—although the Adams administration has no obligation to alter the policy.
Public safety advocates aren’t particularly hopeful that their concerns will be heard. “It’s obviously a pattern that we see repeated,” says Daniel Schwarz, privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union. “They are rolling out more surveillance technologies and pouring more money into policing and surveillance infrastructure instead of the actual services that New Yorkers need.”
At the press conference in Fulton Station, standing next to Deputy Mayor Banks and an Evolv scanner, Adams seemed intent that the technology would be successful.
“Let’s bring on the scanners,” Adams said, adding: “We are taking a huge step toward public safety.”
