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NYPD Developing Van-Mounted Body Scanners To Detect Concealed Weapons On The Street
By
John Del Signore
Published Jan 17, 2012
Modified Jan 17, 2012
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By
John Del Signore
Published Jan 17, 2012
Modified Jan 17, 2012
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[UPDATE BELOW] Presumably sick of all the bleeding heart liberals whining about civil rights, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly has devised an elegant solution to sidestep the controversy over his department's stop and frisk policy. Speaking at a State of the NYPD breakfast this morning, Kelly announced that the NYPD is developing a kind of infrared technology that will enable police officers to detect whether individuals are carrying guns under their clothing. Sure, it's not as badass as shooting down a plane, but at least cops will finally be able to see what's under our clothes without having to get out of their cars.
The mechanism, which the NYPD is developing with help from the U.S. Department of Defense, currently only works at a short range of three or four feet. But Kelly thinks they can improve it to scan citizens from a distance of up to 25 meters away. He announced this morning that the gadget will be mounted on NYPD vans with "the infrared rays shooting up the street at the person," as the Post puts it.
The device detects the radiation emitting from a person’s body, and it can't penetrate metal, so a concealed gun can be spotted from the image captured by the detector's lens. It's unclear how much the new technology will cost the city, but hopefully it's less than that $10 million Kelly blew on a big shipment of X-Ray glasses he ordered from the back of Boy's Life.
UPDATE: Sought for comment about the virtual pat-down of the Future, NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman issued this statement:
Like all New Yorkers, we are eager for solutions to the intractable problem of gun violence. We find this proposal both intriguing and worrisome. On the one hand, if technology like this worked as it was billed, New York City should see it’s stop-and-frisk rate drop by a half-million people a year. On the other hand, the ability to walk down the street free from a virtual police pat-down is a matter of privacy. We have no idea how this technology works, if it is effective, and what it’s error rate is. If the NYPD is moving forward with this, the public needs more information about this technology, how it works and the dangers it presents.
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infrared scanners
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Ray Kelly
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stop and frisk
John Del Signore
Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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