New York City Mayor Eric Adams is working to convince state officials to install weapons scanners at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and the city’s subway system.
The move follows another shooting in the subway this Sunday morning, when 48-year-old Goldman Sachs analyst Daniel Enriquez was shot and killed while seated in the last car of a Manhattan-bound Q train.
“We’re trying now to negotiate with the Port Authority to allow us to place scanners at the bus terminal because many of these guns are coming from the south into our city, so we have to stop the flow of these guns,” Adams told the NY Daily News.
Port Authority spokesperson Amber Greene told the news outlet the same. “We are actively collaborating with city and state law enforcement partners and will continue to explore all appropriate technologies that can improve safety and security of the traveling public,” Greene said.
The technology is similar to that used by Israel at the entrance to its international airport and other venues.
The mayor first raised the idea back in January, when he suggested the installation of artificial intelligence-driven weapons detectors in the subway system.
He raised it again last month following a mass shooting on a subway train in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn that left 10 people dead and 23 more wounded on a crowded N train.
“We have identified several new technologies that are not like metal detectors that are used at airports, where you have to empty your pockets and go through a long line to get in,” he told an interviewer on WNYC Radio.
“You just walk normally through the system. It is not even detectable that the devices are there. And we think there is some great promise in this technology, and we are going to continue to explore that.”
Adams acknowledged at the time there are some difficulties with implementing the technology in the public mass transit system but said the city might do “a few pilot projects” to determine whether it fit the bill for New York City.
“We are excited about the possibilities and I’m not going to leave any legal technology off the table when it comes down to keeping New Yorkers safe,” he said in a second interview on the MSNBC ‘Morning Joe’ program.
Adams has also called an emergency meeting for this Thursday with top business leaders to discuss the violence in the subways.
Partnership for New York City CEO Kathy Wylde told the NY Post that she spoke with Adams on Monday morning about the upcoming meeting, warning the mayor that public safety is an even bigger concern for business leaders than COVID-19.
“Every New Yorker can identify with the terror of being trapped on a moving subway with a deranged gun man because we all take the subways and when they’re not moving – you can’t get off,” she said.
