Shotgun farmers weapons7/2/2023 ![]() “When you start peeling back the onion on what the technology actually does and doesn’t do, it’s much different than the reality these companies present,” said Donald Maye at IPVM. ![]() Though Evolv touted the report as “fully independent,” there was no disclosure that the company itself had paid for the research. (Evolv has said the public version of the report had information removed for security reasons.)įive law firms recently announced investigations of Evolv Technology - a partner of Motorola Solutions whose investors include Bill Gates - looking into possible violations of securities law, including claims that Evolv misrepresented its technology and its capabilities to it. When Evolv released a public version of the report, according to IPVM, a surveillance industry research publication, and underlying documents reviewed by The Intercept, the failures had been excised from the results. In 2022, the National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security, a government body, completed a confidential report showing that previous field tests on the scanners failed to detect knives and a handgun. In December, it came out that Evolv, a publicly traded company since 2021, had doctored the results of their software testing. “Private companies are preying on school districts’ worst fears and proposing the use of technology that’s not going to work,” said Stefanie Coyle, deputy director of the Education Policy Center at the New York Civil Liberties Union, or NYCLU, “and may cause many more problems than it seeks to solve.” Over 65 school districts have bought or tested artificial intelligence gun detection from a variety of companies since 2018, spending a total of over $45 million, much of it coming from public coffers, according to an investigation by The Intercept. “Private companies are preying on school districts’ worst fears and proposing the use of technology that’s not going to work and may cause many more problems than it seeks to solve.” “I know that I’m not going to be threatened with any firearms, any knives, any sort of metallic weapon at all,” one said. In a video produced by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district in North Carolina about its new $16.5 million system, students spoke about how the technology reassured them. Utica City is one of dozens of school districts nationwide that have spent millions on gun detection technology with little to no track record of preventing or stopping violence.Įvolv’s scanners keep popping up in schools across the country. It’s not clear how the knives entered the building, but it was less than three months after the school district spent $3 million installing Evolv scanners.Īs school shootings proliferate across the country - there were 46 school shootings in 2022, more than in any year since at least 1999 - educators are increasingly turning to dodgy vendors who market misleading and ineffective technology. Last month, a knife fight erupted between students at Mifflin High School in Ohio. Stories about Evolv systems missing weapons have popped up nationwide. In the elementary and middle schools, which retained Evolv scanners, three knives have been recovered from students - but not because the scanners picked them up, according to Nolan. Ultimately, Utica City School District removed and replaced the scanners from their high schools, costing the district another $250,000. ![]() “They don’t tell you - will it pick up a machete or a Swiss army knife? We’ve got like really nothing back from Evolv.” “They’ve tried to backtrack by saying, ‘Oh no, it doesn’t pick up all knives,’” said Brian Nolan, who had been appointed acting superintendent of the Utica City School District 10 days before the stabbing. On Halloween, however, it remained silent. The detector did finally go off: It identified a 7-year-old student’s lunch box as a bomb. School authorities reached out to Evolv and were subsequently told to increase the sensitivity settings to the highest level. Earlier that month, at a parents’ night, a law enforcement officer had walked through the system twice with his service revolver and was puzzled to find it was never detected. In Utica, the 17-year-old’s weapon wasn’t the first knife, or gun, to bypass the system. The scanners, from Massachusetts-based Evolv Technology, look like metal detectors but scan for “signatures” for “all the guns, all the bombs, and all the large tactical knives” in the world, Evolv’s CEO Peter George has repeatedly claimed. ![]() The Utica City School District had installed the $4 million weapons detection system across 13 of its schools earlier that summer, mostly with public funds. The 17-year-old then approached a fellow student, pulled a hunting-style knife out of his backpack, and repeatedly stabbed the other student in the hands and back. O n Halloween day last year, a 17-year-old-student walked straight through an artificial intelligence weapons detection system at Proctor High School in Utica, New York.
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