eric adams – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Gun Detection Tech The Gun Detection Tech Firm Said Wouldn’t Work In NYC Subways Doesn’t Work In NYC Subways

from the another-feather-in-the-mayor's-cap dept

What are the odds.

Evolv, a gun detection tech firm contracted by the city of New York to handle fare jumping by scanning for guns, told everyone — including its investors — that deploying its tech in NYC subways wasn’t exactly a great idea. It made this statement even as Mayor Adams was telling people he was going to save the city by adding this tech to the swarm of police officers and National Guardsmen already patrolling the underground.

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.”

On March 28, 2024, Mayor Adams was telling the city that deploying this tech would be a historical moment in the annals of public safety… or space exploration… or something.

[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.”

Weird. Someone being pushed onto subway tracks isn’t the sort of problem that can be solved with gun detection tech. And it certainly can’t be solved with gun detection tech even the CEO of the company providing the tech says won’t reliably detect guns in this particular application.

Of course, it’s possible it would not have detected guns no matter where Evolv’s scanners were placed. A prior test run at a Bronx hospital didn’t net many guns, but it did manage to generate an 85% false positive rate during the seven-month pilot program.

Given this astounding lack of success — along with the company’s admission the tech was not well-suited to handle electrical interference from subway tracks — you’d think the mayor would have started courting other government contractors. But he didn’t do that because he liked a lot of the people who worked for Evolv. Both Mayor Adams and his then-deputy mayor Philip Banks (both of whom are subjects of current FBI investigations) were NYPD officers. So was Evolv’s regional sales manager, Dominick D’Orazio. And the company’s CEO — the same one quoted above saying the tech won’t work reliably in subways — has used the company’s ties to the NYPD to pitch it to other cities and law enforcement agencies.

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.”

Here’s what NYC residents are paying for, mainly because Mayor Adams hasn’t met a cop-involved grift he’s not willing to support:

A pilot program testing AI-powered weapons scanners inside some New York City subway stations this summer did not detect any passengers with firearms — but falsely alerted more than 100 times, according to newly released police data.

Through nearly 3,000 searches, the scanners turned up more than 118 false positives as well as 12 knives, police said, though they declined to say whether the positive hits referred to illegal blades or tools, such as pocket knives, that are allowed in the transit system.

WTF. At best, the gun detection system detected 12 knives. At worst, the gun detection system did nothing more than sound the alarm a dozen times when fully-legal items passed through its scanners.

The mayor’s office can’t spin this, especially not now when it has much bigger problems to deal with (like a corruption investigation that seems to involve pretty much every one of Mayor Adams’ appointees). This is an objective failure. And it’s exactly the kind of failure the CEO of the Evolv made clear might be a real possibility if the tech was used in the NYC subway system.

Hopefully, this will be the end of this experiment. But who knows what might happen if Mayor Adams manages to walk away from this corruption investigation unscathed. He’s apparently willing to keep throwing money at his cop buddies despite their lack of success. And he’s the kind of cop who believes the only reason some new invasive tech hasn’t worked so far is because it hasn’t been deployed hard enough or often enough to reduce false positive percentages to a level where they might not make national headlines as quickly.

Evolv has gun detectors to sell. And, in Mayor Adams and those with the same “deploy first, evaluate later” mentality, they have a market that’s probably not nearly as limited as we might hope it would be. This stuff isn’t going away. It’s just going to get better PR and possibly a better set of customers that aren’t on the verge of having “disgraced” and “former” added to their title of “NYC Mayor.”

Filed Under: ai, eric adams, gun detection, nyc, nyc subway
Companies: evolv

The FBI Has Apparently Spent A Year Trying To Crack NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ Personal Phone

from the MAYOR-BEATS-FEDS dept

The spectacular collapse of the Mayor Adams’ administration is still in progress. Pretty much everyone with ties to the ex-cop, current mayor has either been informed of an ongoing investigation or managed to infer that following multiple raids by the FBI.

The mayor’s handpicked police commissioner, Edward Caban, resigned shortly after these raids occurred, most likely because he was on the receiving end of one of these raids. So were First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks, Phil Banks’ brother, David Banks, who is the schools chancellor, and Timothy Pearson, the mayor’s adviser.

Edward Caban issued a “get out of accountability free” missive to the NYPD as he left the building. He was replaced by former FBI Special Agent Michael Donlon… whose own house was also raided by the FBI.

In the middle of all this raiding and resigning, the Mayor’s PR people came forward to say the mayor was shocked, shocked! to discover there might be some sort of corruption-laden city government with himself at the center of all of it. The issued statement wasn’t quite the exoneration it was meant to be:

“As a former member of law enforcement, the mayor has repeatedly made clear that all members of the team need to follow the law.”

You know who doesn’t have to say that kind of thing repeatedly? Someone who oversees a bunch of people who have expressed no interest nor engaged in acts that might potentially violate the law. No honest politician/advisor/political appointee/police chief needs to be “repeatedly” reminded to “follow the law.” It just comes naturally to most people.

But Mayor Adams’ people are not most people. A lot of them are also former cops. Perhaps that explains all the corruption.

Mayor Adams himself isn’t immune to this ongoing investigation. In fact, he experienced his own personal raid a year before the onslaught of recent raids that have made headlines around the nation. Now that the mayor is under indictment, court filings are starting to expose a lot of details that were deliberately kept out of public view as the FBI engaged in its investigation.

One of those details is the fact that the FBI executed a search warrant targeting multiple phones used by Mayor Adams. However, his personal phone was not among those seized. A subpoena was issued ordering the mayor to turn over his personal phone (which is alleged to be the device the mayor used to “communicate about the conduct described in this indictment”). Mayor Adams complied. Sort of. He gave the FBI his phone. What he didn’t give the FBI was a way to see the phone’s contents, according to this report by Gaby Del Valle for The Verge.

When Adams turned in his personal cellphone the following day, charging documents say, he said he had changed the password a day prior — after learning about the investigation — and couldn’t remember it.

Sure looks like an attempt to withhold and/or destroy evidence. The fact that this happened the day after the FBI seized the mayor’s other phones isn’t going to work out well for him in court. His excuse — that he couldn’t remember it — is no more believable than his office’s assertion that everyone engaged in legal behavior because they were repeatedly told not to violate the law.

But both of those statements are far more believable than the mayor’s explanation of the post-FBI visit password changing:

Adams told investigators he changed the password “to prevent members of his staff from inadvertently or intentionally deleting the contents of his phone,” the indictment alleges.

LOL

Keep in mind, this was the mayor’s personal phone. Pretending staffers had routine and easy access to it or its contents beggars belief. And the simplest way to prevent staffers from “accidentally” deleting evidence of alleged criminal actions would be to maintain possession of the phone on your person or throw it in a safe or lock it in a desk drawer or do literally anything other than change a password and immediately “forget” what it was.

Again, none of this is going to reflect well on the mayor as he faces these charges in court. Any judge will see it the way the rest of us see it: a deliberate attempt to thwart a federal investigation.

Even so, let’s hope this doesn’t result in any stupid precedent motivated by the mayor’s apparently willful attempt to obstruct this investigation. There’s some potential here for rulings that might negatively affect Fifth Amendment rights and/or give the feds leverage to agitate for compelled assistance from phone manufacturers.

Because there’s a chance it might do any of these things. The FBI has had the phone for a long time. And it still hasn’t managed to access its contents. The FBI insists (without supporting evidence, obviously) that this is a BIG DEAL that might BREAK THE CASE.

During a federal court hearing, prosecutor Hagan Scotten said the FBI’s inability to get into Adams’ phone is a “significant wild card,” according to a report from the New York Post.

I want to believe that might be true. But only because I want the feds to deliver a ton of incriminating evidence that takes down Mayor Adams and anyone else in his administration who engaged in corruption. On the other hand, the FBI always claims any phone it can’t get into must be loaded with incriminating evidence capable of producing slam-dunk prosecutions. The FBI’s anti-encryption agitation relies on its fervent belief that the best and most incriminating evidence is always found on encrypted devices, therefore courts should force companies (or accused persons) to decrypt the contents so special agents can open and close investigations without ever leaving their desks.

I’m definitely here for the fallout. I’m guessing these raids will lead to a string of resignations, a cooperating witness or two, and a few wrist slaps for ex-law enforcement officials. But if someone’s going to burn for this, it should be the person at the top of the city food chain. And as much as I’d like to see that happen, I’d much rather it was accomplished without collateral damage to Ccnstitutional rights or the security and privacy provided by strong encryption.

Filed Under: 5th amendment, doj, encryption, eric adams, fbi, nyc, phone searches

NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ Ex-Cop City Hall Buddies Spent Most Of Last Week Getting Raided By The FBI

from the ex-cop-distances-himself-from-ex-cops-he-employed dept

The most powerful entity in New York City isn’t the Mayor. Or City Hall. It has always been the NYPD, which has never been overseen by anyone who could remotely be considered capable, much less willing, to hold the department accountable, at least not in my lifetime. The chain of succession at City Hall over the past 40 years runs from Ed Koch to Rudy Giuliani to Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio, with a brief stop for David Dinkins, who was quickly kicked to the curb by open bigotry and powerful police unions when it became clear he might actually try to introduce stronger accountability measures.

Bill de Blasio was the only mayor to be roundly rejected by the NYPD, and even that rejection was only temporary. Everyone in this chain of commanders has done everything they can to protect the NYPD. The present mayor may be the worst so far — a company man whose years of service as an NYPD officer have made him more deferential than most.

New York City hasn’t quite reached the levels of corruption that has made Chicago (in)famous, but it’s going to keep trying! With each passing year and election of an NYPD-worshiping mayor, the level of corruption increases. Believing otherwise is pure denialism.

And now, the mayor whose buddies in the cop shop (some current, some former) led him to deploy a gun-detection system the system’s developer has admitted won’t actually work where it’s being deployed (NYC’s subway system) is now at the center of another classic NYC clusterfuck. Here’s ABC News with more details:

The FBI conducted searches at the homes of two of New York City Mayor Eric Adams‘ closest aides on Thursday, sources familiar with the investigation told ABC News.

The Hamilton Heights home of First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, who is engaged to Schools Chancellor David Banks, and the Hollis, Queens, home of Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks, were searched as part of an ongoing investigation, the sources said.

That early reporting might make it seem as though these raids were tied to a couple of outliers, albeit ones working very closely with Mayor Eric Adams. Later reporting makes it clear the problem isn’t limited to Sheena Wright and Phil Banks.

On Wednesday, in coordinated early morning raids, FBI agents seized phones and/or searched the homes of more than half a dozen senior city officials, including Sheena Wright, first deputy mayor; David Banks, schools chancellor, and his brother Philip Banks III, deputy mayor for public safety; Edward Caban, NYPD commissioner; and Timothy Pearson, mayoral adviser.

That’s multiple raids in one day, all targeting City Hall employees with close ties to Eric Adams. You’ll also note that one of the raid targets was the NYPD commissioner himself, Edward Caban — someone who has his own antagonism towards notions of law enforcement accountability.

But there’s a larger law enforcement nexus here. Eric Adams is a former NYPD officer. Philip Banks is a former NYPD department chief — one who resigned suddenly a decade ago when news surfaced he was involved in the bribing of several city officials. Adams liked Banks enough to give him a job, despite his immediately obvious ethical concerns.

Mayor Adams’ adviser, Timothy Pearson has his own issues. He held down a job at Resorts World Casino while simultaneously working for the mayor’s office. Pearson only exited his casino job after this double-dipping was exposed by the press. He’s also been sued four times for sexual harassment.

As for Commissioner Caban, he’s his own bag of trouble:

Commissioner Caban came under a cloud when it turned out his brother, Richard, was operating a Bronx bar and restaurant called Con Sofrito — a place where Adams celebrated his birthday and NYPD brass liked to party — in violation of multiple building and fire-safety codes and a judge’s order to shut down an outdoor terrace.

And yet, he’s still somehow the NYPD commissioner. And all of this comes on top of preexisting scandals, including multiple convictions tied to illegal fundraising for Adams’ 2021 mayoral campaign.

Eric Adams — a.k.a. Mr. Law Enforcement — doesn’t seem to be all that concerned about enforcing laws. His staff and political appointees are allegedly engaged in an unknown amount of lawbreaking. And that only covers the recent raids, which, at minimum, imply unlawful activity. There’s also plenty of confirmed lawlessness on the record.

All of that adds up to this spectacularly terrible response from the mayor’s office in response to the raids:

“Investigators have not indicated to us the mayor or his staff are targets of any investigation,” the mayor’s chief counsel, Lisa Zornberg, said in a statement. “As a former member of law enforcement, the mayor has repeatedly made clear that all members of the team need to follow the law.”

First, the feds don’t need to “indicate” anything about the mayor’s staff. It’s already clear at least one member of his staff (adviser Timothy Pearson) is the “target” of an “investigation.” Second, what the fuck does this even mean: “the mayor has repeatedly made it clear that all members of the team need to follow the law.”

I have worked a number of jobs over the past 30 years, both as a subordinate and a supervisor. I have been told (or have told others) to “follow the law” exactly zero times over that period. This is not a normal thing for people to say. If it’s something you have to say “repeatedly,” it’s because you or the people you employ are “repeatedly” trying to violate the law or, as the case would seem to be here, actually violating the law.

Not that the NYPD is handling this any better following the raid of Commissioner Caban’s house. Its response to these events was to eject anyone asking questions or reporting on the raids.

When the Post tried to reach chief of patrol John Chell for comment about the raids and subpoenas,” the paper reports, “NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Public Information Tarik Sheppard got on the phone and called the reporter a ‘f- – – ing scumbag.’” Minutes later, the department reportedly kicked Tina Moore, the Post’s police bureau chief, out of the press room at NYPD headquarters.

Not a great look for anyone involved or anyone close to those involved. This is going to get extremely interesting extremely quickly. Friends, cohorts, and actual employees of the mayor and his office have already been on the receiving end of FBI raids. It’s only a matter of time before the bell tolls for the mayor himself. Even if Adams was smart enough to generate some plausible deniability, someone under investigation is going to roll over and offer up enough evidence to pierce this façade. Mayor Adams may ultimately survive this, but it’s going to leave permanent scars.

The overarching theme, however, is something we’ve seen several times before: the people who talk the loudest about law and order are the people who most frequently decide laws don’t apply to them. Power corrupts, and those with the most of it are almost always the first to succumb to this inevitability. As for the city itself, I guess it’s time to try again when the next election rolls around. But history suggests Adams will just be replaced by someone equally terrible and equally subservient to the whims and demands of the city’s law enforcers.

Filed Under: corruption, eric adams, fbi, new york city, nypd

NYC Proudly Announces Rollout Of Gun-Detecting Tech Even Tech Producer Says Won’t Reliably Detect Guns

from the here's-something-else-doomed-to-fail! dept

There’s nothing more self-congratulatory than a government announcing it’s DOING SOMETHING ABOUT SOMETHING. That’s the New York City government at the moment, lauding its efforts to reduce crime in the city’s subways by installing tech even the tech manufacturer has stated isn’t capable of doing what’s being asked of it.

In mid-May, Mayor Eric Adams and the city government told New Yorkers something was being done. And that “something” was the installation of gun detection tech. Eric Adams (and I’m sure some city residents) appears to believe the city’s subways are awash in a flood of criminal activity, apparently forgetting the city actually has seen much, much worse over the years.

In addition to scrambling National Guardsmen to subway stations to police (state) passengers, the city has done a whole lot of handwringing over a perceived uptick in subway-related crime. It has also claimed the spike in fare jumpers presents an existential threat to city funding, which is a weird thing for an entity that has always paid for stuff with other people’s money to be saying.

The latest proposal is gun detection tech produced by Evolv. The problem with this supposed solution is that even Evolv says deploying its tech in subways is going to be of extremely limited utility. Georgia Gee’s scathing report for Wired on the tech and the company’s ties to Mayor Adams and several current and former NYPD law enforcement officials made several things clear.

First, this seems to have less to do with keeping subway passengers safe and more to do with pleasing people with high-level connections in the New York government, including the nation’s largest police force.

Second, this tech isn’t going to do what Mayor Adams and other city officials claim it will:

In an investor call on March 15, 2024, Peter George, the [Evolv’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.

Not great! And it’s not entirely clear any future failures should be blamed on the rails. As Gee’s reporting for Wired notes, a previous test run at a Bronx hospital resulted in an 85 percent false positive rate.

But this is what New York’s getting, whether it wants it or not. And whether it works or not. More details here, via reporting by Ana Ley and Hurubie Meko for the New York Times.

New York City officials will begin testing gun-detecting scanners inside subway stations in the coming days in what they say is an effort to address riders’ concerns about crime.

The weapon-detection devices, produced by Evolv Technology, a Massachusetts-based start-up, roughly resemble the metal detectors often found at the entrances of courthouses and concerts. Representatives for Mayor Eric Adams, who announced the pilot, said that a single set of roving scanners would be used to search for weapons at various stations throughout the subway system for one month beginning Thursday or Friday. City Hall officials later corrected Mr. Adams and said that the pilot would begin on an unspecified date.

Speaking of not great, it’s kind of a problem when the mayor himself doesn’t seem to know when these devices will be rolled out. What’s worse is they’re being rolled out without guardrails. The city apparently has nothing in place to track the hit rate of these scanners. Nor does it seem immediately interested in engaging in any form of oversight that might let city residents know whether or not their money is being wasted.

It was not immediately clear how the city would gauge the pilot’s efficacy and whether there were plans to deploy the gadgets more widely. A representative for the mayor said that the city had not entered into a contract with Evolv and that it was not spending any money on the gadgets for the pilot. Officials have said that they are only experimenting with Evolv and that they are still seeking proposals from other companies with similar products.

While this may be a trial run of a proposed “solution” to what is only a perception of an increase in violent crime, there’s nothing in this statement that indicates the city won’t move forward with Evolv even if it does nothing to lower crime rates or even the perception itself.

Trials of products by government agencies generally involve some form of tracking to ensure the product delivers what’s been promised. In New York City, these baselines have been replaced by shrugs and vague assertions about “experiments.” But the word “experiment” means something. (Or, at least it used to.) It’s a scientific term that means current results will not only be tracked, but retained and compared to similar offerings from other companies.

But what’s being said here appears to be nothing more than vague assurances meant to stop journalists from asking further questions, rather than solid assurances that this is the beginning of a thorough process that will ultimately result in the best solution for the subway safety problem, even if that means walking away from gun detection tech entirely.

The most likely outcome is that Evolv will become a permanent part of the subway ecosystem. The company’s incestuous relationship with NYPD officials and the mayor himself strongly suggests the “experiment” will be deemed a success and the company granted a long, lucrative contract. And with nothing having been tracked during the supposed trial run, it will be impossible for anyone to claim Evolv’s system adds nothing to the security of the city’s subways. And that part is definitely by design.

Filed Under: ai, eric adams, gun detection, new york city, nyc, nyc subway
Companies: evolv

Gun Detection Tech Co.: This Won’t Work In Subways; NYC Mayor: We’re Putting It In The Subways!

from the electorate-isn't-sending-us-their-best dept

Oh, man. There’s so much going on here. The headline is only part of it.

We’ll get to it (and through it) as efficiently as possible but expect multiple stops along the way. Georgia Gee’s reporting on this for Wired is devastating. There’s so much stupidity and wrongness going on here, the article almost reads like extremely dark satire.

A little background: for whatever reason, the current mayor and law enforcement officials believe the subways are more dangerous than ever, possibly because they’ve completely forgotten the solid two-decade run of horrific crime that began in the 1970s and only began declining to current rates in the mid-1990s.

Then there’s the transit authority, which seems to believe that it’s dealing with an epidemic of fare-jumping — one never before witnessed by an agency suffering from the same sort of long-term memory loss.

This has culminated in calls for AI to do everything from recognizing fare jumpers to detecting weapons carried by paying passengers and fare jumpers alike. The state government also surged some National Guard troops to man the perimeter (and interior), giving riders the added bonus of police state vibes as they headed towards certain doom by entering a subway car.

History has been forgotten, replaced by histrionics. Sure, it’s almost spelled the same but only one has any footing in reality.

And speaking of reality, this is where the mayor begins to detach from it. Mayor Eric Adams wants to test-drive gun detection AI created by a company called Evolv in New York subways. And he wants to do it despite company officials making it clear its AI will not perform well under these circumstances.

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.”

Nonetheless, this is the product Mayor Adams prefers. And it’s not entirely his fault. The company’s CEO may have been brutally honest about his tech’s chances in an undesirable environment, but the company’s PR reps were far less concerned. In fact, they were downright cheery, proclaiming Evolv to be a “mission-driven company” that welcomed the opportunity to fail publicly during a test drive in the United States’ most-used mass transit system.

That cheeriness also downplays previous tests of Evolv’s gun detection system in New York City, which haven’t exactly gone well.

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.

So, here we have a product that didn’t function well in an environment that had never been referred to by Evolv’s CEO as non-optimal. And we have a direct statement from the CEO that seems to suggest he’d rather test this tech anywhere else but the NYC subway system.

And then we have the mayor, who has ignored all of this to portray this tech roll-out as win not just for New Yorkers, but possibly for all mankind. I am not even kidding.

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.”

Jesus. I could probably do 10,000 words on the statement alone. I won’t. But I’m still going to do several.

Where do you start? Mayor Adams comparing himself to one of the most beloved presidents/starfuckers to ever hold office? The comparison of looking for guns on a subway to one of the greatest achievements ever in the human race?

How about the fact that the Space Race was originally about asserting dominance? That the space program became more useful scientifically doesn’t erase its origin as a dick-measuring contest between us and the Red Menace. We needed to show them we could do everything better, if only to keep the mutually-assured-destruction temperatures down as much as possible during the Cold War.

Is the mayor comparing subway scofflaws to the USSR? Is he insinuating that ensuring the safety of subway passengers is on par with putting US boots on the lunar ground?

What would installing more metal detectors be portrayed as? Sending animals into orbit? Or does Mayor Adams think that might be a bad idea? After all, police officers are at least as willing to kill dogs as commie scientists.

Or is it this: does he consider AI policing of mass transit a similar scientific achievement? “If we can put a man on the moon, surely we can put an algorithm in a turnstile!” What even the fuck.

And does the mayor really want to detect all the guns? Let’s not forget (as Mayor Adams surely has), this city loves a good guy with a gun. Bernie Goetz was treated as a hero for going all vigilante in a subway car. If you detect those guns, you might find yourself on the wrong side of history. (But that probably doesn’t matter when you can’t even be bothered to remember it.)

Self-aggrandizement aside, there’s probably another reason Mayor Adams is so hot for a product even the company’s CEO expects to disappoint in these conditions. The short answer is Adams like himself, likes cops, and likes anyone willing to let him still be (sort of) a cop while he’s officially the mayor. More great report from Wired’s Georgia Gee:

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.”

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.)

THE ARISTOCRATS!

Yeah, it’s all deeply incestuous. And, because of that, it’s deeply stupid. The tech has failed frequently, including its deployments in schools. It’s gun detection tech that apparently can’t detect guns. But because the mayor and his buddies are deeply involved, it’s being portrayed as the next best thing to martial law by someone currently being completely consumed by his own hubris.

Filed Under: ai, eric adams, gunshot detection, new york city, nyc, nyc subway
Companies: evolv

NYC Officials Are Mad Because Journalists Pointed Out The City’s New ‘AI’ Chatbot Tells People To Break The Law

from the I'm-sorry-I-can't-do-that,-Dave dept

Fri, Apr 5th 2024 05:29am - Karl Bode

Countless sectors are rushing to implement “AI” (undercooked language learning models) without understanding how they work — or making sure they work. The result has been an ugly comedy of errors stretching from journalism to mental health care thanks to greed, laziness, computer-generated errors, plagiarism, and fabulism.

NYC’s government is apparently no exception. The city recently unveiled a new “AI” powered chatbot to help answer questions about city governance. But an investigation by The Markup found that the automated assistant not only doled out incorrect information, it routinely advises city residents to break the law across a wide variety of subjects, from landlord agreements to labor issues:

“The bot said it was fine to take workers’ tips (wrong, although they sometimes can count tips toward minimum wage requirements) and that there were no regulations on informing staff about scheduling changes (also wrong). It didn’t do better with more specific industries, suggesting it was OK to conceal funeral service prices, for example, which the Federal Trade Commission has outlawed. Similar errors appeared when the questions were asked in other languages, The Markup found.”

Folks over on Bluesky had a lot of fun testing the bot out, and finding that it routinely provided bizarre, false, and sometimes illegal results:

There’s really no reality where this sloppily-implemented bullshit machine should remain operational, either ethically or legally. But when pressed about it, NYC Mayor Eric Adams stated the system will remain online, albeit with a warning that the system “may occasionally produce incorrect, harmful or biased content.”

But one administration official complained about the fact that journalists pointed out the whole error prone mess in the first place, insisting they should have worked privately with the administration to fix the problems cause by the city:

If you can’t see that, it’s reporter Joshua Friedman reporting:

At NYC mayor Eric Adams’s press conference, top mayoral advisor Ingrid Lewis-Martin criticizes the media for publishing stories about the city’s new Al-powered chatbot that recommends illegal behavior. She says reporters could have approached the mayor’s office quietly and worked with them to fix it

That’s not how journalism works. That’s now how anything works. Everybody’s so bedazzled by new tech (or keen on making money from the initial hype cycle) they’re just rushing toward the trough without thinking. As a result, uncooked and dangerous automation is being layered on top of systems that weren’t working very well in the first place (see: journalism, health care, government).

The city is rushing to implement “AI” elsewhere in the city as well, such as with a new weapon scanning system tests have found have an 85 percent false positive rate. All of this is before you even touch on the fact that most early adopters of these systems see them are a wonderful way to cut corners and undermine already mistreated and underpaid labor (again see: journalism, health care).

There are lessons here you’d think would have been learned in the wake of previous tech hype and innovation cycles (cryptocurrency, NFTs, “full self driving,” etc.). Namely, innovation is great and all, but a rush to embrace innovation for innovation’s sake due to greed or incurious bedazzlement generally doesn’t work out well for anybody (except maybe early VC hype wave speculators).

Filed Under: automation, eric adams, hype, ingrid lewis-martin, innovation, language learning models, nyc, tech

NYC Mayor Eric Adams Says That If Police Radio Transmissions Aren’t Encrypted, The Terrorists Will Win

from the selling-fear,-buying-opacity dept

The NYPD has a problem with encryption, as do some of its preferred prosecutors. Back in 2010, Deputy Commissioner for Counterterrorism and Intelligence told NBC news reporters that the city was filled with terrorists willing to leverage everything from “rocks, bottles, and accelerants” to wage war on New York — something aided by these speculative persons’ ability to utilize device encryption to cover their digital tracks.

This message was reiterated (repeatedly!) by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, who spent most of his years in office decrying the encryption options being offered to members of the general public, which Vance claimed was pushing the city towards yet another criminal apocalypse.

But as soon as the NYPD felt it could benefit from encryption, it decided to do so. While still operating under the theory that civilian encryption options only aid and abet criminals, the NYPD began moving towards encrypting its own communications, under the theory that unencrypted communications made officers less safe and secure.

No one involved in this shift towards encrypted NYPD communications has ever bothered to recognize the cognitive dissonance that says protecting private people’s communications is a net loss for society while protecting cop communications is a net gain.

The fact is securing communications increases the safety of everyone utilizing this option. But the NYPD has had little positive to say about device or communication encryption options utilized by regular people.

NYC Mayor Eric Adams has proven himself to be just as strong an ally of the NYPD as his predecessors. The city’s residents seem more interested in NYPD reform, but Adams isn’t the man to do it. Instead, he’s clearly demonstrated he will elevate the NYPD’s concerns above the people the department serves. And he’s willing to go totally old school to do it, raising the specter of terrorism and suggesting his city is home to tons of terrorists willing to exploit their access to PD radio transmissions.

First highlighted on X/Twitter by NY Times reporter Dana Rubenstein, the details of Mayor Adams’ recent press conference are more fully fleshed out by Bob Hennelly of NY-focused site Work-Bites.

In an answer to a question from Work-Bites, Adams, a former NYPD captain, said scrambling to obstruct the public’s monitoring of the radio traffic was necessary to prevent crafty criminals from being able to track and anticipate police deployments.

“Public safety is number one, and I know that for members of the media it’s easier to get the information as they report crimes that are taking place in progress — but bad guys are doing it [monitoring the radio] also. They are being aware when police officers are responding — they are being aware of the routes police officers are doing. There are bad people out there.”

Adams went on to observe that the city had “been fortunate” to not get hit with another major terrorist event but that he was concerned the open police radio traffic could be accessed by “sleeper cells” that were “sophisticated.”

The mayor has planted his rhetorical flag somewhere between the Cold War and the War on Terror in hopes of silencing opposition to this move to encrypted communications — an effort that not only would prevent “sleeper cells” from eavesdropping, but prevent journalists and transparency activists from getting first-hand reports of police activity. This puts everyone in the city at the mercy of the NYPD’s PR wing, allowing the department to craft narratives that can’t be refuted by communications between dispatchers and officers.

Even if you think it’s acceptable to cut the public out of the loop because you think the way Mayor Adams thinks, it seems especially dangerous to sideline another set of public servants/first responders simply because the NYPD would rather prevent the proles from eavesdropping.

The same mayor who justified police radio encryption with the phrase “public safety is number one” is supporting a move that doesn’t actually elevate public safety to the number one position. Here are the comments given to Work-Bites by the president of the fire department’s labor union, Lt. Vincent Variale:

Variale […] told Work-Bites, it’s not like it used to be “when you could listen to all the police channels and know specifically where the danger was — like if there was a shooting going on and you could actually start responding while also avoiding getting caught in the middle of it.”

A classic example, Variale said, is you have a shooting and “EMS rolls up to the scene and they have no clue the shooter is still there — or that the police are running after the shooter in the very same direction of where one of our crews is located.”

“We dropped the ball here,” Variale added, “and put the cart before the horse. They should have worked out access for us and all the other professionals — as well as for all the volunteer EMS units that we rely on from Day One of this rollout.”

This move ensures that only one part of the first responder network will be (supposedly) secure from the nefarious actions of criminals with police scanners and/or “sleeper cells” just waiting for the right call signal to switch from “sleeping” to “awake.”

The unarmed members of the city’s first respondents are now expected to work their way through the fog of war without the benefit of police communications. They may decide to “run towards the sound of gunfire” only to find their backs riddled with friendly-fire bullet holes or performing the bullet-catching duty the NYPD is supposed to perform because they’re unaware of ongoing threats and/or their location.

No matter how the mayor or the NYPD spin this, the primary motivation for encrypting police communications is to cut the public out of the loop. It’s just another layer of opacity meant to separate public servants and the public, ensuring the more powerful entity (the NYPD) still has the power to shape narratives without being undercut by their own words or actions. If that means placing other first responders in harm’s way, so be it. It’s a sacrifice the NYPD is willing to make, and one the city’s mayor is willing to support by invoking the unproven and unverifiable existence of terrorists lying in wait to raze New York City to the ground.

Filed Under: encryption, eric adams, nypd, transparency

from the can't-admit-you-fucked-up-the-schools-too,-huh? dept

Every time we think it can’t possibly get dumber, it does. Last month, we wrote about the absolute nonsense in which New York City mayor Eric Adams declared social media a public health hazard, akin to toxic waste. As we noted at the time, this was in the midst of a variety of scandals of his own making and contrary to all of the actual evidence about social media.

Even more ridiculously, in order to support this claim of social media being “toxic,” he had the city’s Health Commissioner release an advisory about the dangers of social media. Except, as we noted, if you actually read the advisory, it does not actually make the argument that social media is toxic. Rather, it suggests parents and teachers talk to kids about the possible risks of how they use social media. That’s not how you treat an actual toxin that has no redeeming values.

Of course, now it seems there was something else (beyond just Adams trying to shift the topic of conversation away from his own scandals) behind this decision to declare social media toxic.

Last week Adams had New York City sue all the social media companies, claiming they are a public nuisance. Everything about this is stupid.

The actual complaint, filed in California state court in LA (not a New York court, and not northern California where the companies are mostly based) is beyond dumb. The lawyers on the lawsuit are from Keller Rohrback, the same ambulance chasing law firm that has convinced a ton of school districts to file similar lawsuits. It appears that Keller Rohrback has built up a successful sales practice telling school districts (and now municipalities) that they can get free money by suing social media companies over totally baseless, vexatious, potentially sanctionable claims.

These are not serious complaints by serious people. These are vexatious jokes of complaints.

The lawsuit insists as fact that social media has created the teen mental health crisis, even though the overwhelming majority of research, including multiple meta-studies of studies, have said that’s just not true. It makes a ton of ridiculous claims about features that people like being put in place for nefarious, evil reasons that aren’t just “we’re trying to build a service people keep using.”

Even in cases where the sites have implemented thoughtful approaches to kids’ usage, the complaint argues it’s not enough. For example, Snap put in place a privacy-protective Family Center tool that is well designed, but the complaint argues by not letting parents spy on their kids every message it is “woefully inadequate.”

In August 2022, Snap introduced the “Family Center.” The features and processes offered through the Family Center are woefully inadequate to protect teen and pre-teen users. The Family Center allows a parent or guardian to install Snapchat on their phone and then link to the child’s account. The parent or guardian can then see who the child user is communicating with. However, the substance of these communications remains hidden and still disappears after the allotted time. In addition, the Family Center does not allow a parent or guardian to block minors from sending private messages, control their child’s use or engagement with many of Snapchat’s platform features, control their child’s use of Snapchat’s geolocation feature, or control who their child may add to their friend list. Finally, the Family Center fails to help a parent monitor their child’s account when the child has secretly created a Snapchat account without the parents’ knowledge in the first place.

What sort of crazy Orwellian surveillance society nightmare fuel is that? Websites shouldn’t just let parents spy on their kids’ personal messages. THAT is a recipe for increasing the mental health crisis. As we’ve noted, actual research has suggested that helicopter parenting and not allowing kids to have lives of their own may be the leading cause of the teen mental health crisis these days.

And here’s a lawsuit claiming that if parents can’t spy on every aspect of their kids’ communications, it must be breaking the law.

That is truly fucked up, Mayor Adams.

The lawsuit also argues that sites’ efforts at age verification are “inadequate” even as multiple courts have said that mandated age verification is unconstitutional. Mayor Adams and the lawyers at Keller Rohrback are literally claiming that failing to do something that has already been claimed to be unconstitutional must violate the law.

YouTube’s ineffective age verification feature means that Google fails to protect children from other platform features discussed below that Google knows to be harmful to kids.

The complaint blusters on with nonsense after nonsense for an astounding 302 pages before finally (finally, finally) getting to what they believe are the actual causes of action: public nuisance and negligence. That’s not how either of these laws work.

What this lawsuit — like all of Keller Rohrback school district lawsuits — really does, is show that whoever is filing them shouldn’t have any role related to the education of children. They are admitting that they are too incompetent to actually educate kids and prepare them for the modern world. They are throwing up their hands and saying “we don’t know how to educate kids, we don’t know how to teach them to be good digital citizens, and therefore we must sue to stop technology.”

It’s the equivalent of suing the ocean for the tide coming in, rather than teaching kids to swim.

Perhaps just as ridiculous is that with the announcement, Mayor Adams got a bunch of damn fools to give quotes about how amazing this stupid vexatious lawsuit is, with each statement dumber than the last. I want to call out two particularly stupid statements though. First is the statement from the city’s health commissioner, Ashwin Vasan:

“Social media is a toxin in our digital environment, like lead, air pollution, and nicotine are in our physical one,” said DOHMH Commissioner Dr. Vasan. “Environmental toxins require regulation, control, and mitigation, and public health must build on its environmental health legacy to address this modern threat.

We’ve talked about this before. Anyone who compares social media to a physical toxin is a liar or an idiot. Social media is speech. A toxin is a chemical. These are not the same things. At all.

Perhaps it’s true that Dr. Vasan is a gullible fool, taken in by nonsense disinformation that he’s read, falsely claiming social media is inherently dangerous. But that’s on him. He shouldn’t take out his conspiracy theory on everyone else.

The other statement that gets me is the one from Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, Anne Williams-Isom:

“Online networks are powerful tools to connect with friends, family, classmates, and so much more,” said Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Anne Williams-Isom. “However, social media can also be a place for unhealthy comparisons to others…. “

No offense, but if building a place where there are “unhealthy comparisons to others” violates the laws, Deputy Mayor Williams-Isom needs to shut down all television, movies, magazines, schools, playgrounds, sporting events, and much more before she finally gets around to social media.

Yes, comparing yourself to others can be damaging. In some cases, it can also be inspiring. But it’s also human fucking nature. Should we work on educating people in media literacy to learn why it’s not healthy in some cases? Sure. But the First Amendment is pretty fucking clear that we don’t get to sue magazines for putting impossibly beautiful people on the cover. That’s not how any of this works.

Why is New York City doing this? Again, the Adams’ administration is mired in scandals, and that includes failures to properly oversee the school system. Indeed, later this year, it’s possible that oversight of the schools may be taken away from Adams. His failures across the city are well known, but his failures in the NY City public school system are despicable and putting kids in danger.

Rather than fix that, he’s decided to try to pin all the blame on Instagram and Snapchat. It’s cynical and disgusting.

And, speaking of cynical and disgusting, if you want to know why the lawsuit was filed in a state court in Los Angeles, the answer most likely comes down to this: last fall, a judge in that exact court, found one of these cases compelling enough to let it move forward. Keller Rohrback has found a sucker of a judge and apparently is trying to route other similar cases through that court, even if this one is properly heard 3,000 miles away.

Filed Under: anne williams-isom, ashwin vasan, eric adams, mental health, new york city, public nuisance, school districts, students
Companies: google, keller rohrback, meta, snapchat, tiktok, youtube

from the stupid-moral-panics dept

It seems that if anything has gone wrong in the world, ignorant and foolish politicians have a readymade scapegoat: it’s all social media’s fault.

NYC Mayor Eric Adams is facing a pretty big list of crises, some of his own making. He’s facing what appears to be a pretty serious corruption investigation. He’s cutting a ton of budget from schools and libraries — but not from his former police colleagues. Speaking of the police, he vetoed a widely supported bill that would have added more transparency to police interactions with the public. And, frankly, it feels like a large percentage of New Yorkers are embarrassed to even talk about their mayor.

But have no fear. In his state of the city address this week, Adams zeroed in on what he says is the real problem in New York City: social media.

Mayor Adams’ version of “look, squirrel!” is to make a big part of his speech being the evidence free declaration that social media is “toxic.” Incredibly, right before claiming that social media is toxic, he talks about how an internet tool that the city set up to help kids was useful, not realizing that this is a form of social media itself:

We know academic preparation is essential to our children’s future, but so is mental health. We are proud of all we have done to promote mental health, in and out of the classroom. Last year, we launched Teenspace to help young people connect with a licensed therapist over phone, video, or text. So far, over 1,500 children have used this free service, and we will continue to get our students the help they need in a way that works for them.

And then immediately turns around and makes bizarre, unsubstantiated, and unsupported claims about the “harms” of social media.

We also need to protect our students from harm online, including the growing dangers presented by social media. Companies like TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook are fueling a mental health crisis by designing their platforms with addictive and dangerous features. We cannot stand by and let Big Tech monetize our children’s privacy and jeopardize their mental health.

That’s why today, Dr. Ashwin Vasan is issuing a Health Commissioner’s Advisory, officially designating social media as a public health hazard in New York City. We are the first major American city to take this step and call out the danger of social media like this. Just as the surgeon general did with tobacco and guns, we are treating social media like other public health hazards and ensuring that tech companies take responsibility for their products. You’ll be hearing more about this soon.

This is ridiculous on multiple levels. First off, last year we had a big post detailing why any comparison between social media and “toxins” like lead paint or tobacco is inherently stupid. Those are things that are known to cause real harm.

With social media, that’s just not true. We’ve gone through this over and over and over again, but the actual science simply does not support the claim that social media is inherently harmful to kids.

What it finds is that, for many kids, social media is quite helpful. It’s a way for them to communicate with friends, to educate themselves, to explore new ideas, and more. In some cases, it can be life-saving. For a very large group, social media is neither good nor bad. It’s just a tool.

For a very small percent, however, there does appear to be some level of danger. And that’s nothing to ignore. But, even there, the relationship is complicated. Some of the evidence suggests that the causal part is in the opposite direction (i.e., those kids who are already dealing with mental health issues for other reasons retreat to social media, which can then be dangerous for them).

The right way to deal with this, according to tons of experts, is to look for ways to help that small percentage of kids who are at risk, where social media exacerbates problems.

But declaring social media, universally, to be a “public health hazard” like it’s toxic waste or second-hand smoke is, not just wrong and ignorant, but literally counterproductive. Given that some of the recent research suggests that the real cause of the teen mental health crisis is the lack of spaces for teens to be teens without parents hovering over them, declaring all of social media as a “public health hazard” will only lead to shutting down the spaces that many, many teens use to connect with their friends (most of whom can do so healthily).

Again, social media seems like a convenient scapegoat — especially for a mayor dealing with cascading controversies (some of which may lead to criminal penalties) — but declaring it a public health hazard like tobacco is not only stupid, but directly counterproductive.

Indeed, the incredible part is that for all the headline grabbing of social media now being a “public health crisis,” and Dr. Vasan publicly announcing that he’s declared social media to be a “toxin,” the actual report he released doesn’t support any of that, and instead suggests some common sense approaches to using social media in a healthy manner.

If it were truly a “toxin” you don’t issue a report that is mostly focused on how to use it smartly. We don’t have public health officials talking about how kids can have a healthy relationship with tobacco, or lead paint, or alcohol. With actual toxins, you protect the community from them.

Instead, the actual advisory is mostly focused on being aware of the risks and using social media appropriately. Which is perfectly good advice, but is entirely different than calling it a “public health crisis” and a toxin.

Indeed, the advisory notes the benefits many kids get from social media (imagine a similar advisor for lead paint or cigarettes?).

Adults who interact with children and youth, including caregivers, health care providers, educators and school staff, community-based organizations, and youth development staff, should take opportunities to promote use of social media in a manner that is protective of youth mental health. This includes: a. Implementing tech-free times and places in relevant settings that encourage in-person connection; b. Discussing social media use in an open-minded way with children and youth, and providing support when they identify concerns; and c. Modeling healthy social media use, including sharing use practices and how to be thoughtful with use

And, uh, yeah. Like that’s just generally good advice. It’s also common sense. But it’s difficult to square common sense language like that with “toxin!” or “public health crisis!” Most of the recommendations in the document are along those lines. Be thoughtful about social media use. Parents should talk to their kids about it. Teachers should teach good use of social media based on approved curricula.

I mean, all of those are perfectly reasonable, good suggestions. There is a silly nod towards the end about state and federal laws (many of which are being passed, though all are getting thrown out as unconstitutional), but what’s so stupidly striking about this is that the language Adams and Vasan are using is fear mongering moral panic nonsense. Whereas, the actual “advice” they’re giving is… not at all consistent with their hyperbolic language.

But, of course, being calm and reasonable doesn’t get headlines. And Adams and Vasan want headlines. The headlines they get, though, will mislead the public and create real harm. Because most parents, teachers, and school administrators aren’t going to read the details. They’re going to hear “toxic” and try to ban the usage outright, even as that’s been shown to create very real harms in kids.

In other words, it’s yet another move by Adams that gets headlines but creates a real mess for actual NYC residents.

Elect better people.

Filed Under: ashwin vasan, eric adams, nyc, public health hazard, social media

NYPD’s Stop And Frisk Program Still Limping Along, More Biased Than Ever

from the less-frequent-but-more-terrible dept

It’s been a decade since a federal court declared the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program (mostly) illegal. Judge Shira Scheindlin, in a 195-page decision, pointed out everything that was wrong with the program, which ignored the “Terry stop” parameters defined by the Supreme Court in its 1968 decision to engage in stops of anyone at any time, often accompanied by a “frisk” of the person in hopes of feeling up contraband.

Reasonable suspicion of recent criminal activity was the baseline set by the Supreme Court. The NYPD’s baseline was lower. For the most part, stops/frisks were supported by the reasonable suspicion that the target was a minority moving around in public.

Since that 2013 decision, the NYPD has failed (read: refused) to abide by the fixes proscribed by the federal court. Instead, it has spent the past decade either ignoring the specifics of court-ordered corrective actions or shifting its enforcement efforts to do pretty much the same thing (stop minorities and hassle them) without raising the hackles of its federal oversight.

It’s not all bad news. Stop-and-frisk numbers continue to decline precipitously since their all-time highs prior to the federal court decision in 2013. But it’s not all good, either. As NYC-focused site Gothamist explains (using data obtained by the New York Civil Liberties Union), stops are way down, but the racial bias may be worse than ever.

Police officers reported stopping 8,502 pedestrians in the first half of 2023 – a dramatic drop from the stop and frisk heights of 2011 when police made nearly 700,000 pedestrian stops.

That’s an amazing decrease… in stops, anyway. But the bias that prompted a federal court to order the end of stop-and-frisk as the NYPD preferred to deploy it is still there. Just because it’s happening less often doesn’t mean it’s happening less frequently.

Just 5% of [stopped pedestrians] were white, revealing racial disparities even starker than at the height of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “stop and frisk” era.

A decade on and all NYC residents have is a more finely tuned instrument of racial oppression. This was inadvertently confirmed by the NYPD in its statement to Gothamist.

An NYPD spokesperson said the department does not direct officers to make a certain number of stops, but that police make stops “with increasing levels of precision” based on officers’ observations.

Presumably, this means officers are now capable of detecting whether someone is both black and ambulatory, whereas prior to the reformation of stop-and-frisk, officers just had to guess. The spokesperson calls this 95% non-white targeting “precision.” The NYPD’s data says otherwise:

Of the 7,000 Black and Latino pedestrians the NYPD reported stopping this year, roughly 72% were deemed “innocent.”

Being wrong nearly three-quarters of the time should be no one’s definition of “precision.” And the fact that stops/frisks of white people resulted in a 40% arrest rate doesn’t make things any better or demonstrate the NYPD is just as willing to target Caucasians.

In fact, it shows the opposite of what the NYPD would like it to show or what its spokesperson says the stats show. If 40% of stopped white people are arrested, it simply means NYPD officers are far more careful in their reasonable suspicion calculations when dealing with whites. It’s easier to hassle minorities, which tends to result in a lower hit rate. It’s a bit tougher to deal with people who treat 911 like a customer service line. And if you’re more careful about approaching white people, it stands to reason you’ll only approach those who are practically dripping with suspicion.

And these stats — as damning as they are in this form — are likely even worse than they appear here.

[NYCLU legal director Chris] Dunn estimated that police are making two to three times as many stops as they say under Adams’ public safety strategy, but don’t document unwarranted stops that don’t result in a summons or arrest.

So, these stops are likely under-reported. And biased policing efforts have moved to areas where reasonable suspicion is still the baseline but has yet to be the target of federal court orders and DOJ monitoring. As Gothamist reports, the in-person stops/frisks have largely been replaced by traffic stops. The NYPD performed nearly 670,000 of these last year. Bias-on-foot has been replaced with bias-on-wheels.

About 90% of the drivers searched or arrested were Black or Latino.

Biased policing is still alive and well at the NYPD. It’s just a bit less likely to draw the attention of its federal oversight.

Filed Under: civil liberties, eric adams, nypd, stop and frisk