It's been about three weeks since New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced the use of an AI-powered scanning system aimed at enforcing the city's subway system's status as a "gun-free zone", and so far the city hasn't said how many illegally possessed guns and knives have been spotted using the Evolv system. 

The NYPD, on the other hand, has continued to investigate a number of violent incidents on the mass transit system, including an incident early this morning where a man was robbed by a group of armed straphangers. 

The 25-year-old man was on a southbound F train around 3 a.m. when three men approached him, according to authorities. Police say that’s when two of the men in the group allegedly pulled a knife and gun and took the 25-year-old’s scooter, cellphone and debit card.

While the victim fled the train car at the next station, his assailants allegedly remained on the train as it departed, and there's been no word of any arrest. 

The Wednesday morning robbery follows on the heels of a stabbing last week at a Queens subway station that left the victim in critical condition. 

Feruz Radjabov, 40, allegedly stabbed the 67-year-old man on the A line platform at the Aqueduct North Conduit Avenue subway station in Ozone Park at around 5:10 p.m., according to the NYPD. Officers found the victim lying on the platform with a stab wound to the neck before he was rushed to the hospital in critical condition, police said.

Minutes earlier, the suspect allegedly stabbed a 25-year-old man in the back near a gas pump at a Mobil gas station at 100-03 North Conduit Ave., according to police and sources. The second victim was taken to the hospital for treatment. Radjabov was arrested in the subway station and the knife was recovered at the scene, police said.

To be fair, the weapon-scanning system isn't in place in every subway station, so we don't know if the Big Brother tech surveilled any of these suspects as they entered a subway station. But we do know that Evolv executives themselves have expressed doubts that the system would be of "good use" in the subways, and a previous trial at a New York City hospital generated a high number of false positives, which casts doubt on the efficacy of the system altogether. 

In February 2022, a meeting was set up between New York City mayor Eric Adams’ team and an artificial intelligence gun-detection company called Evolv. An email thread from Evolv representatives included an accompanying brochure, which listed opportunities to partner together: in the Port Authority Bus Terminal, NYC schools, hospitals, and gathering places such as Times Square. One area conspicuously missing from the list, though, was the subway.

After an in-person meeting a few days later, Evolv cofounder Anil Chitkara made another attempt to sell the company’s technology—through name-dropping.

“As I mentioned, Linda Reid, VP Security for Walt Disney World (Florida) has known us since 2014 and deployed many of our systems at the Parks and Disney Springs,” Chitkara wrote in a February 7 email to the Mayor’s Office, obtained by WIRED. “They’ve had success screening for weapons with Evolv Express … There may be some interesting parallels to how you are thinking about everyone’s role in security."

The comparison of safety in NYC to that in Disney World apparently helped to persuade the Adams team. A couple of weeks later, Evolv’s technology was used to screen visitors in a city-run Bronx hospital, where a man had been shot inside the emergency room in January 2022. This wasn’t very successful—the scanners produced false positives 85 percent of the time during the seven-month pilot.

If Evolv’s accuracy in a hospital was low, its accuracy in NYC subway stations may be worse. In an investor call on March 15, 2024, Peter George, the company’s CEO, admitted that the technology was not geared toward subway stations. “Subways, in particular, are not a place that we think is a good use case for us,” George said, due to the “interference with the railways.”

Despite those caveats and the less-than-stellar results of Evolv's test run in the Bronx hospital, Adams called the technology a "Sputnik" moment for public safety when he announced that Evolv would be coming to NYC subway stations earlier this year. 

So far it looks like more of a Flopnik than anything else. Shootings and stabbings are still taking place on subway cars, in addition to the robberies and muggings where the only weapons used are fists and feet. It's an open question as to whether Evolv can identify weapons being brought into the subway system, but it most certainly can't scan what's inside the hearts and minds of riders. The system isn't a cure-all for violence in New York City's mass transit system, and the city's insistence that public transportation be off-limits to lawful concealed carry means that riders are at a distinct disadvantage to those who see the subway system as a target-rich environment of unarmed and helpless victims.