The Legal Aid Society is condemning Mayor Eric Adams’s recently announced plan to deploy gun detection systems in select New York City subway stations.

“Shortly after the Mayor announced the gun detection system pilot earlier this year, multiple media outlets confirmed what we already know: that these invasive technologies are ineffective and frequently trigger false alarms,” said Diane Akerman, an attorney with Legal Aid’s Digital Forensics Unit. “Even the CEO of a weapon detection-system company acknowledged that subways were not a ‘good use-case’ for the technology.”

“New Yorkers want a safe subway system that works. These scanners will create significant inconvenience, adding congestion and delays to an already overburdened system,” she continued. “Even worse, they are an unjustified invasion of privacy, and put people’s lives – particularly those of our clients, the majority of whom are people of color – at risk from the panic that an inevitable false alarm would induce.”

In May, Legal Aid submitted comments and condemned the NYPD for violating the POST Act with its Draft Impact and Use Policy (IUP) to deploy invasive and ineffective weapon scanning systems in New York City’s subway system.