Weapons Detectors And Drones: The Past, Present, and Future of the NYPD's Surveillance Technology
Mayor Eric Adams wants to expand the NYPD’s tech arsenal to prevent gun violence, but he might be doing more harm than good.
There isn’t much that can shake New York City.
Decades of violent crime and terrorist attacks have left the city with an unflinching, mind-your-business attitude — a city that needs to be told to say something when it sees something. In the 1990s, graffiti riddled the trains and murders entered the thousands annually. Then, steadily, crime began to decrease, and by the 2010s, the number of murders in New York City had dropped to a low not seen since the early 20th century.
But progress has been fragile. In the summer of 2020, just a few months after the first cases of COVID-19 shut down the city, New York City experienced an explosive surge in gun violence. The streets of Midtown were barren, but murders spiked — including the shooting death of a 1-year-old baby in Brooklyn. Since 2020, the number of shootings and homicides have remained relatively level, but a year of seemingly random violent attacks has left New Yorkers on edge.
“The fear is real,” said Michael Alcazar, a former New York Police Department (NYPD) detective and adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “We might very well be headed in the direction of [the crime of] the 90s.”
As a former NYPD beat cop, newly installed Mayor Eric Adams ran for office in 2021 with a tough-on-crime approach. One of his most ambitious plans as mayor was his “Blueprint to End Gun Violence,” a 15-page plan detailing his efforts to curtail the rising gun violence in New York City. The mayor’s warnings about gun violence in the city seemed to ring true three weeks ago when shooter Frank James opened fire on a Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) train car, injuring 10. After the Brooklyn subway shooting, Adams reintroduced a previous proposal for subway gun-detecting technology — a project that is not only earnest, but is well underway.
Though Adams’ crime plan originally contained only a single paragraph about expanding the city’s use of technology to identify people carrying guns, surveillance technology has quickly become one of Adams’ principal anti-gun strategies. The mayor has always been a tech-lover — he made waves back in 2021 when he declared he would be receiving his first paycheck in cryptocurrency. Throughout his first year as mayor, Adams has made the news several times for proposing technological expansions to the New York City Police Department.
Many of these were buzzy eye-catchers, like his consideration of a drone fleet to chase suspects and deter crime. However, they represent the continuation of a legacy of invasive policing in New York that primarily impacts people of color and has the potential to spiral out of control. As fear of violent crime increases, so does the NYPD’s technological arsenal, and according to experts, it will have consequences.
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The manhunt for the Brooklyn subway shooter revealed the NYPD’s technical shortcomings in the form of broken security cameras. Despite the NYPD’s 15,000+ security cameras in New York City and the facial recognition technology that they claim is a “valuable tool in solving crimes and increasing public safety,” it was a call from a security technician in the East Village that ultimately enabled James’ arrest.
However, Mayor Adams brushed off the camera malfunction, instead choosing to tout the soon-approaching pilot program for his previously mentioned gun detection devices in an interview on Good Morning America. Despite not technically having jurisdiction over the MTA, he mentioned narrowing down potential manufacturers to three companies, one of which was Evolv Technologies, a security screening company that has tested its detectors in sites like the LA Metro, several public schools, and a hospital in the Bronx.
Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the New York-based Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), worries that the detectors would enable a new form of racially discriminatory stop-and-frisk, an NYPD practice in which police officers were able to stop, pat down, and question civilians they believed to be in possession of a gun. In 2013, a federal judge declared the use of stop-and-frisk unconstitutional, citing the disproportionate targeting of Black and brown people.
“It won’t be all New Yorkers who are subjected,” Cahn said. “We know that. We will see [weapons detectors] used as a pretext to stop and frisk young BIPOC New Yorkers, just as we’ve seen them targeted with stop-and-frisk.”
Farhang Heydari, Executive Director of NYU Law’s Policing Project, argues that the searches that result from weapons dectector alarms could be even more dangerous than the average stop-and-frisk.
“In these situations, there’s some machine that’s telling the officers there’s a weapon,” Heydari explained. “[The officer on duty is] going to be on heightened alert. They’re going to be concerned for their safety. And you’ve got to worry that the interaction is going to quickly spiral into use of force. And so that’s my real concern — it’s going to lead to unnecessary uses of use of force on top of the unnecessary stops and searches.”
Unlike traditional metal detectors, Evolv uses a combination of electromagnetic fields and AI to assess threats. However, this system has not always proven to be reliable. In April, Vice published an article describing the issues Evolv encountered when implementing their sensors in some South Carolina and Indiana schools. The device misidentified students’ Chromebooks as weapons 60–70% of the time.
“This is an incredibly ineffective and error-prone technology,” Cahn stated. “These systems frequently are claiming that everyday objects like a laptop or an eyeglasses case are actually guns. It will mean false positives and constantly pulling New Yorkers aside and stopping and frisking them.”
(Evolv Technologies initially responded to a request for an interview but did not follow through, citing a full schedule.)
Alex Vitale, professor and coordinator of Brooklyn College’s Policing and Social Justice Project, has studied and written about policing for over 30 years and has spearheaded police reform efforts for just as long. Vitale pointed out that the NYPD has always had a penchant for “security theater.”
“After 9/11, [the NYPD] started doing these bag searches on the subways,” Vitale said. “There is absolutely no reason to believe that this provided any safety or security from terrorism. In essence, it’s not there to provide security, it’s there to provide a theater of security that is to be consumed by voters.”
This security theater is also heavily utilized by the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) despite having limited effectiveness. In a 2014 interview with Politico, Harrington, a former TSA agent, called policies like body scans, liquid bans, and shoe removal “reactionary,” primarily made to reassure, but not actually protect, passengers.
“[The bag check policy] doesn’t actually produce any safety,” Vitale said. “No attacks are deterred, no bombs are found. What is found is people who forgot there was some marijuana in their bag, or who were carrying a knife for work. And this is who ends up getting the brunt end of policing as a result of this theater of security. The same thing will happen if we put in place this metal detection system.”
As long as surveillance technology has existed in the U.S., it has also been discriminatory towards BIPOC. In Simone Browne’s book “Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness,” she describes a New York City law passed in 1713 that required Black and Native American slaves to carry a lantern if they ventured out at night.
“Lantern laws made the lit candle a supervisory device… and part of the legal framework that marked black, mixed-race, and indigenous people as security risks in need of supervision after dark,” Browne wrote.
The advancement of technology over the years has enabled that work to continue. After 9/11, the NYPD faced intense backlash for surveilling New York City’s Muslim communities through use of photo and video cameras and intelligence databases. More recently, they used controversial facial recognition technology to identify and pursue Black Lives Matter protestors in the summer of 2020.
Not only is surveillance technology applied unevenly across races, the technology itself can be inaccurate when it comes to people of color. A 2018 study by MIT’s Joy Buolamwini found that, across facial recognition software, there were far higher error rates when applied to darker-skinned people (especially women) than there were with lighter-skinned people. However, the NYPD still routinely uses facial recognition tech, and Mayor Adams even voiced his intent to expand the technology’s use.
The NYPD’s use of surveillance technology has always been a black box. Their excuses for hiding information from the public vary, but they often use counterterrorism as a reason to keep the specifics confidential. However, in 2017, anti-surveillance and civil rights groups like STOP, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), and the Brennan Center introduced a bill to increase transparency regarding this technology.
In 2020, the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act was passed by the New York City Council and signed into law by Mayor de Blasio, requiring the NYPD to “disclose basic information about the surveillance tools it uses and the safeguards in place to protect the privacy and civil liberties of New Yorkers.” As a result, the NYPD was required to publish “impact and use policies” regarding everything from security cameras to drones to facial recognition tools.
However, the information provided still contains major gaps, especially regarding more obscure technologies like X-ray vans, which use radiation to peer into buildings and vehicles.
“The NYPD is trying to fight compliance with the law,” Cahn said. “They’ve tried to break the law in some cases… [but] despite all of the shortcomings of their statements, we did learn about new systems such as their deployment of internet attribution management systems, which are capable of orchestrating large numbers of fake accounts to follow people on social media, enticing them to click away their constitutional rights against police surveillance.”
The POST Act also mandates that the NYPD open any major surveillance technology introductions to a 45-day period of public comment, but they are not required to make changes in accordance with those comments.
“They have to listen, but they don’t have to follow,” said Daniel Schwarz, a Privacy and Technology Strategist at the NYCLU. “Based on the law, they just had to consider it, but they are not bound in any way to go towards that direction.”
When presented with these privacy concerns, former NYPD detective Michael Alcazar remarked that ordinary citizens should not worry about their privacy being compromised.
“As far as facial recognition,” he said, “we’re not going to identify people walking around on the street. I don’t see [the NYPD] using drones to just randomly fly around Manhattan. If we can use [the gun detectors] to identify people entering the subway with guns, then I’m all for that.”
But what if you’re not the suspect of a crime or carrying a gun? Will you still be on the NYPD’s radar? Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says yes.
“When it comes to social media surveillance, [the NYPD] might say it’s just for suspects,” said Guariglia. “[But] getting onto one of these lists of people who get monitored on social media isn’t always about being a suspect of a crime. Sometimes, being a victim of a crime is enough to get your social media handles under surveillance, being friends with somebody that’s been accused of committing a crime, [or] being a family member of someone who is accused of committing a crime.”
However, critics of the NYPD’s surveillance tech argue that not only does the tech promote racial discrimination and violate privacy — it also simply does not work to the extent promised.
In 2018, the NYPD announced its purchase of 14 drones, costing a total of nearly $500K. They claimed the drones would “undoubtedly help keep New Yorkers and officers safe.” However, as of 2022, they have all but run out of uses for the drones. In the first quarter of this year, the drones have only been used 19 times — 14 of which were f0r training.
“It’s of course understandable that there’s this desire to do something in response to these horrific incidents,” said Schwarz. “But the solution is not to expand surveillance technologies that clearly don’t work, especially when we have data and know of all these flaws, and actually put in place systems that create much bigger harms and dangers instead of helping with the problem at hand.”
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When crime in the city was at its lowest, it was easy for New Yorkers to reject NYPD tech that they felt was an infringement of their rights. In December of 2020, the NYPD’s Assistance Response Unit attempted to introduce a $94,000 robot dog to its force. The public immediately rejected the tech, and even former mayor de Blasio called it “creepy” and “alienating.” The backlash was so intense that, within four months, the robot dog was retired from its police duties and rehired at the Fire Department.
However, in more uncertain times, the police are able to use more dramatic crime-fighting measures in the name of public safety. In the 90s, an era of notoriously high crime, New Yorkers feared being robbed, beaten, or killed by criminals who seemed to rule the streets. They elected Rudy Giuliani as mayor in 1993, and he presented them with an idea — “broken windows policing.”
Broken windows policing operated on the theory that low-level crimes such as smashing a window or jumping a turnstile facilitate more major crimes, like murder and rape. Giuliani’s police commissioner began an aggressive crackdown on vandalism, fare beating, and panhandling that was supported by liberals and conservatives alike. As usual, Black and brown people suffered the brunt of the crackdown, and thousands were jailed or fined for misdemeanors like smoking marijuana in public.
The broken windows theory has since been debunked, and evidence suggests that crime was already decreasing prior to Giuliani’s election. Adams claims he will not be bringing back broken windows policing, instead calling his strategy “quality-of-life” policing. However, the core idea is the same — that low-level crimes like public urination, selling marijuana, and fare beating “can be precursors to violence,” in the words of an NYPD press release.
According to a Quinnipiac University poll, 49 percent of New York City voters list crime as their number one concern. The same poll lists 86 percent of respondents in support of more police officers in the city’s subways. 62 percent specifically think the installation of gun detectors in the subways is a “good idea.” New Yorkers’ thoughts are consumed by an overwhelming fear of crime — so much so that they are willing to make sacrifices of convenience and privacy in the name of personal safety, something that the NYPD is very aware of.
“I think anyone, including Democrats, are saying, ‘Maybe we jumped the gun on defunding the police,’” Alcazar said. “Police were demoralized because they didn’t get the support of de Blasio. I think now, for the most part, police officers feel they have the support of the mayor and the police commissioner.”
There is no one solution to violent crime, but we can look at a common thread when it comes to random attacks — the failure of New York’s mental health system. Subway shooter Frank James posted videos on his Youtube channel detailing his struggle getting help for his post-traumatic stress disorder, and Martial Simon, the man who pushed a woman onto the subway tracks earlier this year, often complained that he was discharged from psychiatric hospitals too soon.
“This is generally the case when we’re looking at these kinds of spree shooting incidents,” Vitale said. “We’ve systematically defunded mental health services in the United States. And then we walk around like, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe there are people in crisis causing harm to people.’ So let’s actually rebuild a mental health structure. One that’s better than what was here before. That would be one place to start.”
Despite New Yorkers’ fears, violent crime is nowhere near as common as it was in the 90s (there were nearly 80% fewer murders last year than there were in 1990). However, there is a very real danger that the NYPD will return to the stringent policing of the 90s — this time, with advanced and expensive technology and Mayor Adams in the lead. And the consequences may be far more devastating than the benefits, according to Vitale.
“We imagine that these are cost-free interventions. ‘Oh, well, if we save one life, then the whole thing is worth it.’ Or if we prevent one robbery, then the whole thing is worth it. But what’s never included in a statement like that is what the costs are to achieve that. What if, in the process of pursuing this metal detector data, someone triggers it, and they end up in a confrontation in which they kill someone? Which happens then? Have we really saved a life? Have we really made the city safer?”
(The NYPD and the Mayor’s Office could not be reached for comment.)
