Cameras outfitted with Artificial Intelligence could alert authorities when a gun is pulled on the city’s subways — and the NYPD is eyeing the technology, officials said.
NYPD Assistant Commissioner Kaz Daughtry told NY1 that the tech might be one way to stop weapons in the wake of the shooting on an A train in Brooklyn last week.
“I’m looking at technology where we can use our current cameras in the actual subway system and integrate that with technology where we can detect weapons,” he said.
When asked by The Post about the AI cameras technology, the NYPD said it “continues to look into what technology is available. The NYPD does not currently have a timeline.”
Gun-detection AI seeks to send an alert to authorities “before that first shot is fired,” said Sam Alaimo, one of the co-founders of ZeroEyes, a company that runs the software in public places across the country.
ZeroEyes, located in the Philadelphia area, trains an algorithm to spot firearms once they are drawn.
It can’t see them stuffed in bags or tucked in waistbands.
The software is meshed with existing digital cameras at schools, government agencies, transit systems and other entities.
Company analysts then monitor blank screens that only go live once guns are detected, company officials said.
If the analyst believes the item is a weapon, they alert authorities directly.
“From the moment that gun is seen in front of a security camera within about three to five seconds, the end user, the school, subway, the military base, the shopping mall, the grocery store, will get that alert,” Alaimo said.
They will also get “a picture of the shooter, the exact location of the shooter and the exact time the shooter was there.”
The notifications should also make it easier for law enforcement to manage the scene once they arrive, he said.
One high-ranking police source said the technology would be helpful, but he believes criminals will find a way to foil it.
“The reality is once the information is dispersed out to the general public, you can rest assured that criminals will find a way around it,” the source said.
Another source said the city was planning to test the technology in 2023 but that the subway cameras were “extremely sub par.”
Noah McClain, a professor at Santa Clara University in California who has studied the city’s underground, said he believes there are “very few occasions in which you can actually get a visual on a singular entity exempted from sleepy stations during sleepy hours.
“And so maybe you can get cameras in that kind of environment to detect what may look like a handgun,” he said, “but you’re going to have an enormous number of false negatives, false positives.”
