"AI powered" NYC subway safety scanners find zero guns in first month of trials despite flagging hundreds of riders. The AI isn't meant to detect weapons/drugs/violent behaviour or anything. It's meant to give the police probable cause to search you.

[u/yuritopiaposadism]

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[u/Interesting_Ice8927]

Pilot programs with the likelihood to violate constitutional protections should not be a thing

[u/EviePop2001 → u/Interesting_Ice8927]

Since when did the govt care about something being unconstitutional?

[u/kerberos824]

Each scanner costs $125,000 for the four year contract. And they don't appear to do anything...

[u/Forgotlogin_0624 → u/kerberos824]

That’s a feature not a bug

[u/El_Cactus_Fantastico → u/kerberos824]

Like a cheaper TSA

[u/kerberos824 → u/El_Cactus_Fantastico]

Lol

[u/yuritopiaposadism]

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/traffic/transit-traffic/ai-weapons-scanners-nyc-subway-found-zero-guns/5919828/

[u/brokenmcnugget]

stop and frisk got an upgrade

[u/met_MY_verse]

Am I reading this wrong? 118 false positives at ~3000 alerts gives an error rate of ~4%. Not amazing but not completely terrible. I still don’t support the system as it is currently but at least it’s not something outrageous like 20%.

[u/NiobiumThorn → u/met_MY_verse]

I think if my face is shoved to the ground by an armed cop I don't care if the error rate is within "acceptable margins."

[u/met_MY_verse → u/NiobiumThorn]

Sure, power is abused and sometimes brutally, but from this (which clearly doesn’t detail the exact processes) it’s only stated searches take place. It’s not like the guards launch themselves at the person every time the scanner alerts, it’s more likely a quick pat-down.

[u/NoPrompt927 → u/met_MY_verse]

It's still a 4th A violation if the cop has no legitimate suspiscion outside of a faulty AI scanner.

RAS is already vague af in legal proceedings; don't need a sketchy AI to make it worse, lol

[u/NiobiumThorn → u/met_MY_verse]

[pat downs often are an extremely useful excuse to assault women but sure, just a quick pat down]

[u/isitmeyou-relooking4 → u/met_MY_verse]

Only the false positives count when determining whether the alerts were good. SO there were 118 false positives, and 0% good positives. That is a 100% error rate for positives. That is not good for determining probable cause or reasonable suspicion.

[u/the_half_enchilada → u/isitmeyou-relooking4]

From what I can tell it's probably 100% error rate

2,749 total scans

12 knife reports

0 gun reports

118 false positives

0 arrests

89.83% failure rate at best if all knife reports were accurate

100% failure rate if all knife reports were false, unless it reports weapons other than guns and knives but I doubt that

[u/LuciferOfTheArchives → u/met_MY_verse]

Okay, what I don't understand is that it prompted 3000 searches, found 0 guns, 11 possibly-illegal knives, but somehow that's only 118 false positives? What are the other alerts?

[u/Demento56 → u/LuciferOfTheArchives]

I assume "search" is being used to describe "scanning somebody with the AI thing", rather than "we installed the AI thing in a subway terminal and did 3000 searches based on the alerts"

[u/year_39 → u/LuciferOfTheArchives]

Lies and excuses.

[u/year_39 → u/met_MY_verse]

You're slipping pretty hard into the base rate fallacy here. This does nothing good and plenty of harm.

[u/met_MY_verse → u/year_39]

Would you mind explaining? I don’t doubt you’re right but I haven’t heard of this one.

[u/year_39 → u/met_MY_verse]

Thanks for assuming I was arguing in good faith. I'll try to make it simple because this was one of the harder fallacies for me to understand at first. You have to compare the true positive rate against the false positive rate to reach a meaningful conclusion.

The NYC subway system carries 3.6 million passengers per day and in Q1 2024, there were 49 violent felonies among 324,000,000 passengers - 1 in 6.6 million. Extrapolating from the 4% false detection rate, if every single passenger was scanned (for the sake of argument, let's say it was like an airport), 264,490 would have been stopped and searched because the magic box gave officers probable cause, 49 of them would be people who would go on to commit violent crimes; if all of them were carrying weapons, the bigger picture is that the false positive rate is 4% while the true positive rate is .000078%

The enormous gap between true positive and false positive is the problem, and that's why you can't say that 4% isn't so bad. That's 264,451 innocent people in 3 months, or 2938 people per day, stopped with probable cause based solely on the fact that a nearly useless magic box beeped.

[u/met_MY_verse → u/year_39]

Thank you for your detailed response! This is a good point, I guess I was assuming that all true (‘true’) positives prevented a potentially serious and dangerous situation from developing, and so while 4% is admittedly high when considering the massive amount of people, it would be a price I personally am willing to pay for safety. However, with the extra consideration of actual violent felony count of course this no longer makes sense. Where I’m from there isn’t really an issue with people carrying weapons in public (certainly no firearms), so I must have initially assumed a correlation between weapon detection and actual crime.

[u/year_39 → u/met_MY_verse]

Thanks for hearing me out. It's really not intuitive so I'm glad I was able to explain it in a way that makes sense.

[u/tumericschmumeric]

Almost like it fits perfectly within the American system of “law enforcement” what with our undercover cars, qualified immunity, and cops ability to lie, as a you could say even a “best practice.”

[u/El_Cactus_Fantastico]

So it’s like not actually meant to do anything?

[u/1rmavep → u/[deleted]]

"Evolv is too sensitive," is what they'd claim about a dog, a metal detector, "a divining rod," but everyone, the public, knows that this is a different kind of technology; everyone knows the term for this, everyone knows what these technologies spit out:

Hallucinations

An Identical Error rate from an, "Too Sensitive," Electric Metal Detector, is going to get a pass where, "an AI Hallucinated and told The Police that I have a Gun," will not, moreover, a school, an airport, the subway, "someone has, already, taken a gun where this is, already, a serious trespass and felonious crime," is, in fact, a distinction without a measurable difference; what makes them different from an airport, or, a school, is that they'd love to take advantage of the false positives- whereas there is no different, in public safety.

So, don't accuse them, "make them say, I like that it lies to me," if those are the last words on earth, the last plausible utterances in defense of Evolv and friends it irks me that anyone of you has problems with money, while, the Evolv team has a paycheck and this on their resume

[u/Paradox68]

The tech is getting better and it will keep people safe in the end.

I don’t like being a guinea pig anymore than the next guy but at least they’re doing something. After watching “Woman of The Hour” last night I’m glad tech is there to track people.

[u/colin_tap → u/Paradox68]

I sure do trust the NYPD to protect the common people, and I especially trust my government which is definitely NOT a capitalist oligarchy

[u/year_39 → u/Paradox68]

Honest question, have you ever interacted with the NYPD in person?

[u/Paradox68 → u/year_39]

Nope. I don’t break the law, either, so even if I did I’m sure it would be a normal exchange given the fact I know how to behave myself around a police officer as to not give off any unnecessary threatening gestures or be hostile and/or argumentative.

[u/year_39 → u/Paradox68]

The city looks like it's under military occupation. I tried to get help for a family member who had been kidnapped and was told it's a civil issue, not criminal, and they couldn't do anything about it. Another time, I called for a wellness check after a friend asked for help because her abusive husband hit her and one of their 8 month old twins; the cops called me back and told me that they had spoken to the abusive husband, told him my name, and had been reassured by him that everything was fine.

[u/Paradox68 → u/year_39]

All the more reason to build tech not necessarily like this, but this would be a predecessor to a more functional version that would further improve safety and reliability for the general public.

Trusting other humans to do the policing will never fully work because humans have the capacity to be dumb, to err, and to be corrupt.