From a Sputnik Moment to a Crime Scene: Why Guns aren’t Detectable in the Bronx Train Stations?

Disney’s flagship park, Magic Kingdom, averaged over 46,000 visitors per day in 2022, according to the Orlando Sentinel. The New York City subway system has more than 3.1 million passengers on average a weekday. Maybe it isn’t a perfect parallel.

In an email to Adams on February 7th, the co-founder of Evolv said that LindaReid the VP Security for Disney World had known them and had deployed many of their systems at the parks. They had success screening for weapons with Evolv Express.

In NYC subway stations, the accuracy of Evolv could be worse if it was low in a hospital. In an investor call on March 15, 2024, Peter George, the company’s CEO, admitted that the technology was not geared toward subway stations. George said that the railways interfered with a good use case for them, so suburbanites aren’t a good place to live.

The comparison of safety in NYC to that in Disney World apparently helped to persuade the Adams team. Two weeks after Evolv got the go-ahead, their tech was used in the Bronx hospital to screen visitors in the emergency room for a man who had been shot. The pilot produced false positives 85 percent of the time.

After meeting with Evolv founder Anil Chitkara, he made another attempt to sell the company’s technology.

Adams stated that Evolv will be tested at the city’s train stations after a man died in the subway in March. “This is a Sputnik moment,” Adams said on March 28. “When President Kennedy said we were going to put a man on the moon.”

Adams wanted Banks to find a gun-detection solution. He was named as an unindicted coconspirator in a federal corruption investigation while he was the NYPD’s chief of department. Banks was never charged with a crime.