When a school district sues social media companies claiming they can’t educate kids because Instagram filters exist, that district is announcing to the world that it has fundamentally failed at its core mission. That’s exactly what New York City just did with its latest lawsuit against Meta, TikTok, and other platforms.
The message is unmistakable: “We run the largest school system in America with nearly a million students, but we’re unable to teach children that filtered photos aren’t real or help them develop the critical thinking skills needed to navigate the modern world. So we’re suing someone else to fix our incompetence.”
This is what institutional failure looks like in 2025.
NYC first got taken in by this nonsense last year, as Mayor Adams said all social media was a health hazard and toxic waste. However, that lawsuit was rolled into the crazy, almost impossible to follow, consolidated version of that lawsuit in California that currently has over 2300 filings on the docket. So, apparently, NYC dropped that version, and has now elected to sue, sue again. With the same damn law firm, Keller Rohrback, that kicked off this trend and are the lawyers behind a big chunk of these lawsuits.
The actual complaint is bad, and everyone behind it should feel bad. It’s also 327 pages, and there’s no fucking way I’m going to waste my time going through all of it, watching my blood pressure rise as I have to keep yelling at my screen “that’s not how any of this works.”
The complaint leads with what should be Exhibit A for why NYC schools are failing their students—a detailed explanation of adolescent brain development that perfectly illustrates why education matters:
Children and adolescents are especially vulnerable to developing harmful behaviors because their prefrontal cortex is not fully developed. Indeed, it is one of the last regions of the brain to mature. In the images below, the blue color depicts brain development.
Because the prefrontal cortex develops later than other areas of the brain, children and adolescents, as compared with adults, have less impulse control and less ability to evaluate risks, regulate emotions and regulate their responses to social rewards.
Stop right there. NYC just laid out the neurological case for why education exists. Kids have underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes? They struggle with impulse control, risk evaluation, and emotional regulation? THAT’S LITERALLY WHY WE HAVE SCHOOLS.
The entire premise of public education is that we can help children develop these exact cognitive and social skills. We teach them math because their brains can learn mathematical reasoning. We teach them history so they can evaluate evidence and understand cause and effect. We teach them literature so they can develop empathy and critical thinking.
But apparently, when it comes to digital literacy—arguably one of the most important skills for navigating modern life—NYC throws up its hands and sues instead of teaches.
This lawsuit is a 327-page confession of educational malpractice.
The crux of the lawsuit is, effectively, “kids like social media, and teachers just can’t compete with that shit.”
In short, children find it particularly difficult to exercise the self-control required to regulate their use of Defendants’ platforms, given the stimuli and rewards embedded in those platforms, and as a foreseeable and probable consequence of Defendants’ design choices tend to engage in addictive and compulsive use. Defendants engaged in this conduct even though they knew or should have known that their design choices would have a detrimental effect on youth, including those in NYC Plaintiffs’ community, leading to serious problems in schools and the community.
By this logic, basically any products that children like are somehow a public nuisance.
This lawsuit is embarrassing to the lawyers who brought it and to the NYC school system.
Take the complaint’s hysterical reaction to Instagram filters, which perfectly captures the educational opportunity NYC is missing:
Defendants’ image-altering filters cause mental health harms in multiple ways. First, because of the popularity of these editing tools, many of the images teenagers see have been edited by filters, and it can be difficult for teenagers to remain cognizant of the use of filters. This creates a false reality wherein all other users on the platforms appear better looking than they actually are, often in an artificial way. As children and teens compare their actual appearances to the edited appearances of themselves and others online, their perception of their own physical features grows increasingly negative. Second, Defendants’ platforms tend to reward edited photos, through an increase in interaction and positive responses, causing young users to prefer the way they look using filters. Many young users believe they are only attractive when their images are edited, not as they appear naturally. Third, the specific changes filters make to individuals’ appearances can cause negative obsession or self-hatred surrounding particular aspects of their appearance. The filters alter specific facial features such as eyes, lips, jaw, face shape, and face slimness—features that often require medical intervention to alter in real life
Read that again. The complaint admits that “it can be difficult for teenagers to remain cognizant of the use of filters” and that kids struggle to distinguish between edited and authentic images.
That’s not a legal problem. That’s a curriculum problem.
A competent school system would read that paragraph and immediately start developing age-appropriate digital literacy programs. Media literacy classes. Critical thinking exercises about online authenticity. Discussions about self-image and social comparison that have been relevant since long before Instagram existed.
Instead, NYC read that paragraph and decided the solution is to sue the companies rather than teach the kids.
This is educational malpractice masquerading as child protection. If you run a million-student school system and your response to kids struggling with digital literacy is litigation rather than education, you should resign and let someone competent take over.
They’re also getting sued for… not providing certain features, like age verification. Even though, as we keep pointing out, age verification is (1) likely unconstitutional outside of the narrow realm of pornographic content, and (2) a privacy and security nightmare for kids.
The broader tragedy here extends beyond one terrible lawsuit. NYC is participating in a nationwide trend of school districts abandoning their educational mission in favor of legal buck-passing. These districts, often working with the same handful of contingency-fee law firms, have decided it’s easier to blame social media companies than to do the hard work of preparing students for digital citizenship.
This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what schools are supposed to do. We don’t shut down the world to protect children from it—we prepare children to navigate the world as it exists. That means teaching them to think critically about online content, understand privacy and security, develop healthy relationships with technology, and build the cognitive skills to resist manipulation.
Every generation gets a moral panic or two, and apparently “social media is destroying kids’ brains” is our version of moral panics of years past. We’ve seen this movie before: the waltz would corrupt young women’s morals, chess would stop kids from going outdoors, novels would rot their brains on useless fiction, bicycles would cause moral decay, radio would destroy family conversation, pinball machines would turn kids into delinquents, television would make them violent, comic books would corrupt their minds, and Dungeons & Dragons would lead them to Satan worship.
As society calmed down, eventually, after each of those, we now look back on those moral panics as silly, hysterical overreactions. You would hope that a modern education system would take note that they have an opportunity to use these new forms of media as a learning opportunity.
But faced with social media, America’s school districts have largely given up on education and embraced litigation. That should terrify every parent more than any Instagram filter ever could.
The real scandal isn’t that social media exists. It’s that our schools have become so risk-averse and educationally bankrupt that they’ve forgotten their core purpose: preparing young people to be thoughtful, capable adults in the world they’ll actually inherit.
Some days, you just have to take the small victories. As the Trump Administration continues to barrage the nation with every terrible thing it can think of doing, it’s clear there’s no level of reprisal capable of keeping pace.
This is one of the small victories, even if it — at first glance — it appears to be a win for the Trump Administration. The indictment against NYC Mayor Eric Adams — stemming from a corruption case that managed to ensnare pretty much all of his closest government confidants — has been dismissed by Judge Dale Ho.
This dismissal event was highly controversial. Once Trump took office, he directed the DOJ to dismiss the case against the mayor. This immediately prompted the resignation of the DOJ prosecutors who had brought the criminal charges. Trump’s preferred DOJ officials publicly pilloried the prosecutors that chose to walk, rather than undermine their ethics. Then Trump’s careerist prosecutors took over, raising a litany of bad faith arguments as to why Eric Adams should be allowed to walk.
Trump wanted Adams to walk, but only while being manipulated by puppet strings. Trump wanted to ensure the mayor would go all in on his anti-immigrant efforts and figured being given a free pass on criminal charges might purchase enough loyalty to get him through the next four years.
So, it might seem that dismissing the charges with prejudice would just be another example of a court failing to act as a check on executive power. But Judge Dale Ho’s dismissal [PDF] makes it clear he’s unhappy with Trump’s DOJ. More than that, this dismissal ensures Adams can’t be prosecuted for these charges, even if the mayor decides he’s not going to be Trump’s puppet.
Trump’s DOJ wants to have both the carrot and the stick. Judge Ho says the court will allow the carrot, but will be confiscating the stick. Here’s how that’s explained in the opening of Ho’s comprehensive, 78-page dismissal:
A critical feature of DOJ’s Motion is that it seeks dismissal without prejudice—that is, DOJ seeks to abandon its prosecution of Mayor Adams at this time, while reserving the right to reinitiate the case in the future. DOJ does not seek to end this case once and for all. Rather, its request, if granted, would leave Mayor Adams under the specter of reindictment at essentially any time, and for essentially any reason.
The Court declines, in its limited discretion under Rule 48(a), to endorse that outcome. Instead, it dismisses this case with prejudice—meaning that the Government may not bring the charges in the Indictment against Mayor Adams in the future. In light of DOJ’s rationales, dismissing the case without prejudice would create the unavoidable perception that the Mayor’s freedom depends on his ability to carry out the immigration enforcement priorities of the administration, and that he might be more beholden to the demands of the federal government than to the wishes of his own constituents. That appearance is inevitable, and it counsels in favor of dismissal with prejudice.
Now, the DOJ is stuck with its politically opportunistic dismissal. If Mayor Adams decides to push back against Trump (however unlikely that is), he has nothing to fear from Trump’s DOJ. At best, they’d have to start over from scratch and find some other set of criminal charges to levy against Adams for his disobedience.
It’s a win, however unsatisfying it is to see a clearly corrupt politician go right back to the job that was at the center of all the corruption. But the DOJ under Trump is just as corrupt. And now it has to live with the results of political lawfare, however inconvenient that might become in the future.
The whole decision is worth reading for its evisceration of the DOJ’s tactics under Trump — something that not only covers its actions in this case, but its seemingly illegal anti-immigration enforcement efforts. Mayor Adams doesn’t come out looking much better by comparison.
As for the immigration enforcement rationale, to the extent that DOJ suggests that Mayor Adams is unable to assist with immigration enforcement while this case is ongoing, such an assertion is similarly unsubstantiated. Indeed, shortly after DOJ made the decision to seek dismissal of the case—and while the Indictment was still pending—the Mayor announced that he would permit Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to operate at the Rikers Island Jail Complex, an act that appears to be contrary to New York City law. In other words, the record does not show that this case has impaired Mayor Adams in his immigration enforcement efforts. Instead, it shows that after DOJ decided to seek dismissal of his case, the Mayor took at least one new immigration-related action consistent with the preferences of the new administration. Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the Indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions.
Back to Trump’s DOJ:
DOJ cites no examples, and the Court is unable to find any, of the government dismissing charges against an elected official because doing so would enable the official to facilitate federal policy goals. And DOJ’s assertion that it has “virtually unreviewable” license to dismiss charges on this basis is disturbing in its breadth, implying that public officials may receive special dispensation if they are compliant with the incumbent administration’s policy priorities. That suggestion is fundamentally incompatible with the basic promise of equal justice under law.
On top of that, there’s no way a court can deny a prosecutorial motion to dismiss a case, outside of extreme cases of criminal contempt by the prosecution. It was always going to end this way. The only remaining discussion was how the judge was going to handle everything he had witnessed over the course of this prosecution, including the Trump DOJ’s sudden interest in setting Eric Adams free. Judge Ho says none of this looks good, but the court can’t simply force the DOJ to carry out a prosecution it’s not willing to undertake on its own.
But, however underwhelming it might feel at the moment, this is the best case scenario. The DOJ wanted Adams sprung. And now he is. For good. Even if he decides he’s not going to return the favor by being Trump’s NYC-based immigration enforcement lackey for the next few years. This forces the DOJ to play by its own twisted rules and denies an extremely vindictive president any leverage he might have had to ensure future cooperation from the disgraced mayor.
Updated: make sure you read the update at the end of this story.
Here’s a fun thing about corruption investigations: Usually when prosecutors uncover one quid pro quo, they don’t resolve it by offering an even bigger quid pro quo. And yet, that appears to be exactly what’s happening with NYC Mayor Eric Adams, who was indicted last fall for allegedly trading favors with Turkish officials, and is now watching those charges evaporate in exchange for helping the Trump administration with its immigration agenda.
The twist — and there’s always a twist — is that the people most effectively pointing out this corruption aren’t the usual suspects. Instead, it’s coming from a bunch of dyed-in-the-wool conservative prosecutors at SDNY who are resigning en masse rather than participate in what they see as a perversion of justice. When the Federalist Society crowd starts quitting over corruption, you know something interesting is happening.
The apparent corruption here isn’t just brazen — it’s documented in black and white. The Justice Department’s order to drop the case doesn’t even pretend to assess the merits of the charges. Instead, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove explicitly tied the dismissal to Adams’ willingness to assist with federal deportation efforts — a textbook example of weaponizing prosecutorial discretion for political ends.
Even more disturbing is the mechanism: the dismissal is “without prejudice,” meaning charges could be refiled at any time. This isn’t just prosecutorial discretion — it’s prosecutorial extortion. The Trump administration has effectively created a sword of Damocles to hang over Adams’ head, ensuring his continued compliance with their immigration agenda. The message is clear: step out of line, and those charges might suddenly become relevant again. It’s the kind of institutional corruption that would make a banana republic blush.
It means that Adams’ personal freedom now outweighs the best interests of the people of New York City.
The system’s response to this corruption has been revealing. For several days after the initial order, an unusual silence descended over the Southern District office — a silence that spoke volumes about the internal struggle taking place. Then came something remarkable: a scathing letter from Acting US Attorney Danielle Sassoon to Attorney General Pam Bondi. Sassoon — a Federalist Society stalwart and former Scalia clerk who’s about as far from a “progressive prosecutor” as you can get — laid bare the rot at the core of this decision in a document that reads like a conservative legal scholar’s manifesto against institutional corruption.
Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged, I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations. As Justice Robert Jackson explained, “the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst.” The Federal Prosecutor, 24 J. Am. Jud. Soc’y 18 (“This authority has been granted by people who really wanted the right thing done—wanted crime eliminated— but also wanted the best in our American traditions preserved. “). I understand my duty as a prosecutor to mean enforcing the law impartially, and that includes prosecuting a validly returned indictment regardless whether its dismissal would be politically advantageous, to the defendant or to those who appointed me. A federal prosecutor “is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all.” Berger v. United States, 295 U.S. 78, 88 (1935).
For the reasons explained above, I do not believe there are reasonable arguments in support of a Rule 48(a) motion to dismiss a case that is well supported by the evidence and the law. I understand that Mr. Bove disagrees, and I am mindful of your recent order reiterating prosecutors’ duty to make good-faith arguments in support of the Executive Branch’s positions. See Feb. 5, 2025 Mem. “General Policy Regarding Zealous Advocacy on Behalf of the United States.” But because I do not see any good-faith basis for the proposed position, I cannot make such arguments consistent with my duty of candor. N.Y.R.P.C.3.3; id. cmt. 2 (“A lawyer acting as an advocate in an adjudicative proceeding has an obligation to present the client’s case with persuasive force. Performance of that duty while maintaining confidences of the client, however, is qualified by the advocate’s duty of candor to the tribunal. ” ).
In particular, the rationale given by Mr. Bove—an exchange between a criminal defendant and the Department of Justice akin to the Bout exchange with Russia— is, as explained above, a bargain that a prosecutor should not make. Moreover, dismissing without prejudice and with the express option of again indicting Adams in the future creates obvious ethical problems, by implicitly threatening future prosecution if Adams’s cooperation with enforcing the immigration laws proves unsatisfactory to the Department. See In re Christoff, 690 N.E.2d 1135 (Ind. 1997) (disciplining prosecutor for threatening to renew a dormant criminal investigation against a potential candidate for public office in order to dissuade the candidate from running); Bruce A. Green & Rebecca Roiphe, Who Should Police Politicization of the DOJ?, 35 Notre Dame J.L. Ethics & Pub. Pol’y 671, 681 (2021) (noting that the Arizona Supreme Court disbarred the elected chief prosecutor of Maricopa County, Arizona, and his deputy, in part, for misusing their power to advance the chief prosecutor’s partisan political interests) . Finally, given the highly generalized accusations of weaponization, weighed against the strength of the evidence against Adams, a court will likely question whether that basis is pretextual. See, e.g. , United States v. Greater Blouse, Skirt & Neckwear Contractors, 228 F. Supp. 483, 487 (S.D.N.Y. 1964)(courts “ should be satisfied that the reasons advanced for the proposed dismissal are substantial and the real grounds upon which the application is based”)
I remain baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached, in seeming collaboration with Adams’s counsel and without my direct input on the ultimate stated rationales for dismissal. Mr. Bove admonished me to be mindful of my obligation to zealously defend the interests of the United States and to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the Administration. I hope you share my view that soliciting and considering the concerns of the U.S. Attorney overseeing the case serves rather than hinders that goal, and that we can find time to meet.
But wait, it gets better! There’s a footnote in Sassoon’s letter that tells you everything you need to know about how modern corruption works. The old-school way was to have your shady meetings in smoke-filled back rooms. The new way, apparently, is to have them in official conference rooms while actively preventing anyone from taking notes:
I attended a meeting on January 31, 2025, with Mr. Bove, Adams’s counsel, and members of my office. Adams’s attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed. Mr. Bove admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting’s conclusion
Nothing quite says you know you’re engaging in some shady ass shit like demanding you collect the notes of anyone in attendance.
What makes this story particularly significant is who’s blowing the whistle. Sassoon isn’t some “woke prosecutor” that the MAGA world can easily dismiss. She’s a card-carrying member of the conservative legal establishment who, until this week, was seen as a rising star in those circles. Her willingness to sacrifice her standing in that world to uphold basic constitutional principles reveals just how far the corruption has spread — and perhaps offers a glimmer of hope that some institutional guardrails still hold.
Sassoon’s stand has triggered a cascade of resignations within SDNY, with seven prosecutors (and counting) choosing to walk away rather than participate in this corruption of justice. The latest resignation letter, a scorching indictment from lead prosecutor Hagan Scotten, is particularly noteworthy. Scotten — who clerked for both Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh and explicitly states his support for the Trump administration — makes it clear that this isn’t about politics; it’s about fundamental principles of justice being trampled for political gain.
There is a tradition in public service of resigning in a last-ditch effort to head off a serious mistake. Some will view the mistake you are committing here in the light of their generally negative views of the new Administration. I do not share those views. I can even understand how a Chief Executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal. But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way.If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.
Scotten’s prediction proved grimly prophetic. As reported just hours ago, Bove and Bondi found their willing executioner — though the circumstances reveal yet another layer of institutional corruption:
The prosecutor acquiesced to file the motion in an attempt to spare other career staff from potentially being fired by Emil Bove, the acting US deputy attorney general and former personal lawyer to Trump, sources briefed on the matter told Reuters. The news agency named the lawyer as Ed Sullivan, a veteran career prosecutor, who agreed to alleviate pressure on his colleagues in the department’s public integrity section of 30 attorneys, two sources said, after his team was given an hour by Bove to decide between them who would file the motion.
“This is not a capitulation – this is a coercion,” one of the people briefed on the meeting later told Reuters. “That person, in my mind, is a hero.” The whole section had reportedly discussed resigning en masse.
The cruel irony of forcing the Public Integrity Section to compromise its own integrity isn’t lost on anyone. This is how institutions die — not with a bang, but with an ultimatum.
There’s a special kind of institutional poetry here: The Public Integrity Section was given an hour to decide who would compromise their integrity. And someone did, not out of cowardice or foolishness, but to protect their colleagues. “A hero,” his colleague called him, and maybe that’s right. But it’s the kind of heroism that only exists in broken systems.
The NY Times has revealed even more disturbing details about the behind-the-scenes machinations. In what reads like a playbook for corrupting justice, Bove apparently coached Adams’ legal team (including Alex Spiro, better known as Elon Musk’s go-to counsel) in a wink-wink-nudge-nudge fashion on exactly what political commitments would make the charges disappear.
During the meeting, Mr. Bove signaled that the decision about whether to dismiss the case had nothing to do with its legal merits.
Instead, Mr. Bove said he was interested in whether the case was hindering Mr. Adams’s leadership, particularly with regard to the city’s ability to cooperate with the federal government on Mr. Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
Mr. Bove also said he was interested in whether the case, brought by the former U.S. attorney, Damian Williams, was a politically motivated prosecution meant to hurt Mr. Adams’s re-election prospects.
In her letter to Ms. Bondi, Ms. Sassoon said that she was “baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached, in seeming collaboration with Adams’s counsel and without my direct input on the ultimate stated rationales for dismissal.”
There’s something almost elegant about it, in a horrifying sort of way. The Justice Department has managed to transform a corruption prosecution into what amounts to a compliance manual for corruption. It’s like they’ve created a template: “Here’s how to trade criminal charges for political favors while maintaining plausible deniability.” And the really wild part? This is all happening after years of the MAGA world screaming about supposed “lawfare” against conservatives. Turns out they weren’t complaining about weaponized justice — they were planning how to do it themselves.
History rhymes: While mass resignations of principled lawyers helped topple Nixon’s presidency, in Trump’s second term they’ve become just another item in the daily digest of institutional erosion. The difference this time? It’s not the usual suspects sounding the alarm. Instead, it’s career conservatives — products of the Federalist Society pipeline — who are putting their careers on the line to preserve what’s left of prosecutorial independence.
As we’ve previously discussed, any path through this constitutional crisis requires principled conservatives to find their voice. The fact that it’s taking career prosecutors to do what elected Republicans won’t speaks volumes about where the real courage in conservative circles resides.
The question now isn’t just whether our institutions can survive this assault, but whether these acts of principled resistance can inspire others before the machinery of justice is fully converted into a tool of political control. The American experiment has survived previous challenges through the courage of individuals willing to place principle above party. We’re about to find out if enough of those individuals still exist.
Update: Incredibly, that report that a prosecutor had agreed to file the dismissal turned out to not be accurate. Many hours later, after no such filing was actually made a few very bizarre things happened. First, Emil Bove filed a notice of appearance in the case. That is… not normal.
Finally, the “nolle prosequi” (a notice saying “we no longer want to prosecute”) was filed. But even the way it was filed is weird and somewhat unprecedented. Two lawyers, including Ed Sullivan (who was mentioned above as effectively agreeing to be the fool to protect his coworkers) signed most of the document, but they did not sign the final statement. Instead, there was a further “order” from the DOJ, signed by Bove alone, telling the Court to effectively dismiss the case:
Even the language here is bizarre. The prosecutors don’t get to “direct” the Court to do anything. That’s likely why Bacon and Sullivan signed the part about “respectfully requests” that the Court issue an order. But Bove leaps in, acting like he gets to order around the judge, and separately signs that part.
Kinda shocking.
What will be interesting now, is to see what Judge Dale Ho does.
Few things have been more enjoyable than watching the collapse of New York City mayor Eric Adams’ personal, cop-focused empire. Granted, if you’re a NYC resident, your mileage will vary because violently disintegrating governments rarely later resolve as fully functional enterprises.
But there’s still something incredibly satisfying as watching a law-and-order mayor bind himself to law-and-order figureheads (literally and figuratively: Adams used to be an NYPD officer and bunch of his buddies either are or were employed by this agency) only to see that loyalty repaid by FBI raids, multiple investigations, multiple sudden retirements, and the ongoing disgracing of pretty much every member of the mayor’s inner circle.
The Adams administration will perhaps end up inadvertently immortalized by this unforgettable statement one of the mayor’s flacks offered (believe it or not) in his defense earlier this year, following multiple raids of city officials by FBI agents:
“Investigators have not indicated to us the mayor or his staff are targets of any investigation,” the mayor’s chief counsel, Lisa Zornberg, said in a statement. “As a former member of law enforcement, the mayor has repeatedly made clear that all members of the team need to follow the law.”
The only reason someone would need to say this once, much less repeatedly, is because the “members of the team” are either currently violating the law or planning to violate the law. What’s surfaced since that point makes it clear it was more of the latter, with the former being relegated to the underachievers in Mayor Adams’ cabinet.
New York City’s top uniformed police officer, the chief of department, abruptly resigned Friday night following allegations of sexual misconduct, setting off local and federal investigations and extending years of turmoil at the Police Department.
The former chief, Jeffrey Maddrey, submitted his resignation and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch accepted it, according to a statement from the department on Saturday.
For the most part, top law enforcement officials only resign to end ongoing investigations or escape punishment that might be the result of completed investigations. There’s too much pension on the line to pull the plug before the situation reaches critical mass. And, given enough years on the force, a partial pension may still be collected even if the resigning person would have been denied a continued payout if the investigation had been allowed to reach its conclusion.
The NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed officer abruptly resigned late Friday night after The Post uncovered explosive allegations that he demanded sexual favors from a subordinate in exchange for massive amounts of overtime.
Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey stepped down soon after The Post contacted the NYPD about Lt. Quathisha Epps’ claims in an exclusive interview that he routinely preyed upon her, asking for sex in NYPD headquarters.
“He wanted to have anal sex, vaginal sex, oral sex,” Epps said. “He was always asking me to kiss his penis.”
Yeah, it’s all pretty awful, even if complying with Maddrey’s demands (allegedly) led to Epps securing hundreds of thousands of dollars of overtime pay for hours that possibly were never worked.
Not that any of these accusations mattered to Mayor Adams, who continued to support Maddrey until October, which would roughly coincide with the time when things started to go south extremely quickly for the mayor himself in terms of FBI raids and concurrent federal investigations. And he continued this support (until it was politically and legally inconvenient) despite Maddrey’s history of misconduct and harassment.
Maddrey was third-in-command in the NYPD. With this resignation, another top spot opens up. Residents hoping it will be filled with someone better than Maddrey probably shouldn’t hold their breath. Mayor Adams has run through four commissioners in the last 18 months, with two of them resigning in the wake of ongoing investigations into the mayor’s office and his political appointees, which also include a couple of former commissioners. With this latest embarrassment, the office of the mayor is continuing to pay the price for placing cronyism above public service and making it more clear than it’s ever been that being a top cop doesn’t require ever being a good cop.
Evolv, a gun detection tech firm contracted by the city of New York to handle fare jumping by scanning for guns, told everyone — including its investors — that deploying its tech in NYC subways wasn’t exactly a great idea. It made this statement even as Mayor Adams was telling people he was going to save the city by adding this tech to the swarm of police officers and National Guardsmen already patrolling the underground.
In an investor call on March 15, 2024, Peter George, the company’s CEO, admitted that the technology was not geared toward subway stations. “Subways, in particular, are not a place that we think is a good use case for us,” George said, due to the “interference with the railways.”
On March 28, 2024, Mayor Adams was telling the city that deploying this tech would be a historical moment in the annals of public safety… or space exploration… or something.
[Following] the death of a man who was pushed onto the subway tracks in late March, Adams announced that Evolv’s gun-detection scanners would be tested in the city’s train stations. “This is a Sputnik moment,” Adams said on March 28. “When President Kennedy said we were going to put a man on the moon.”
Weird. Someone being pushed onto subway tracks isn’t the sort of problem that can be solved with gun detection tech. And it certainly can’t be solved with gun detection tech even the CEO of the company providing the tech says won’t reliably detect guns in this particular application.
Of course, it’s possible it would not have detected guns no matter where Evolv’s scanners were placed. A prior test run at a Bronx hospital didn’t net many guns, but it did manage to generate an 85% false positive rate during the seven-month pilot program.
Given this astounding lack of success — along with the company’s admission the tech was not well-suited to handle electrical interference from subway tracks — you’d think the mayor would have started courting other government contractors. But he didn’t do that because he liked a lot of the people who worked for Evolv. Both Mayor Adams and his then-deputy mayor Philip Banks (both of whom are subjects of current FBI investigations) were NYPD officers. So was Evolv’s regional sales manager, Dominick D’Orazio. And the company’s CEO — the same one quoted above saying the tech won’t work reliably in subways — has used the company’s ties to the NYPD to pitch it to other cities and law enforcement agencies.
Evolv’s connection to the NYPD is something George, Evolv’s CEO, has used to market the company’s technology. “About a third of our salespeople were former police officers,” George said at a conference in June 2022. “The one here in New York was an NYPD cop, and he’s a really good sales guy because he understands who we’re selling to. He has the secret handshake.”
A pilot program testing AI-powered weapons scanners inside some New York City subway stations this summer did not detect any passengers with firearms — but falsely alerted more than 100 times, according to newly released police data.
Through nearly 3,000 searches, the scanners turned up more than 118 false positives as well as 12 knives, police said, though they declined to say whether the positive hits referred to illegal blades or tools, such as pocket knives, that are allowed in the transit system.
WTF. At best, the gun detection system detected 12 knives. At worst, the gun detection system did nothing more than sound the alarm a dozen times when fully-legal items passed through its scanners.
The mayor’s office can’t spin this, especially not now when it has much bigger problems to deal with (like a corruption investigation that seems to involve pretty much every one of Mayor Adams’ appointees). This is an objective failure. And it’s exactly the kind of failure the CEO of the Evolv made clear might be a real possibility if the tech was used in the NYC subway system.
Hopefully, this will be the end of this experiment. But who knows what might happen if Mayor Adams manages to walk away from this corruption investigation unscathed. He’s apparently willing to keep throwing money at his cop buddies despite their lack of success. And he’s the kind of cop who believes the only reason some new invasive tech hasn’t worked so far is because it hasn’t been deployed hardenough or often enough to reduce false positive percentages to a level where they might not make national headlines as quickly.
Evolv has gun detectors to sell. And, in Mayor Adams and those with the same “deploy first, evaluate later” mentality, they have a market that’s probably not nearly as limited as we might hope it would be. This stuff isn’t going away. It’s just going to get better PR and possibly a better set of customers that aren’t on the verge of having “disgraced” and “former” added to their title of “NYC Mayor.”
The spectacular collapse of the Mayor Adams’ administration is still in progress. Pretty much everyone with ties to the ex-cop, current mayor has either been informed of an ongoing investigation or managed to infer that following multiple raids by the FBI.
The mayor’s handpicked police commissioner, Edward Caban, resigned shortly after these raids occurred, most likely because he was on the receiving end of one of these raids. So were First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks, Phil Banks’ brother, David Banks, who is the schools chancellor, and Timothy Pearson, the mayor’s adviser.
In the middle of all this raiding and resigning, the Mayor’s PR people came forward to say the mayor was shocked, shocked! to discover there might be some sort of corruption-laden city government with himself at the center of all of it. The issued statement wasn’t quite the exoneration it was meant to be:
“As a former member of law enforcement, the mayor has repeatedly made clear that all members of the team need to follow the law.”
You know who doesn’t have to say that kind of thing repeatedly? Someone who oversees a bunch of people who have expressed no interest nor engaged in acts that might potentially violate the law. No honest politician/advisor/political appointee/police chief needs to be “repeatedly” reminded to “follow the law.” It just comes naturally to most people.
But Mayor Adams’ people are not most people. A lot of them are also former cops. Perhaps that explains all the corruption.
Mayor Adams himself isn’t immune to this ongoing investigation. In fact, he experienced his own personal raid a year before the onslaught of recent raids that have made headlines around the nation. Now that the mayor is under indictment, court filings are starting to expose a lot of details that were deliberately kept out of public view as the FBI engaged in its investigation.
One of those details is the fact that the FBI executed a search warrant targeting multiple phones used by Mayor Adams. However, his personal phone was not among those seized. A subpoena was issued ordering the mayor to turn over his personal phone (which is alleged to be the device the mayor used to “communicate about the conduct described in this indictment”). Mayor Adams complied. Sort of. He gave the FBI his phone. What he didn’t give the FBI was a way to see the phone’s contents, according to this report by Gaby Del Valle for The Verge.
When Adams turned in his personal cellphone the following day, charging documents say, he said he had changed the password a day prior — after learning about the investigation — and couldn’t remember it.
Sure looks like an attempt to withhold and/or destroy evidence. The fact that this happened the day after the FBI seized the mayor’s other phones isn’t going to work out well for him in court. His excuse — that he couldn’t remember it — is no more believable than his office’s assertion that everyone engaged in legal behavior because they were repeatedly told not to violate the law.
But both of those statements are far more believable than the mayor’s explanation of the post-FBI visit password changing:
Adams told investigators he changed the password “to prevent members of his staff from inadvertently or intentionally deleting the contents of his phone,” the indictment alleges.
LOL
Keep in mind, this was the mayor’s personal phone. Pretending staffers had routine and easy access to it or its contents beggars belief. And the simplest way to prevent staffers from “accidentally” deleting evidence of alleged criminal actions would be to maintain possession of the phone on your person or throw it in a safe or lock it in a desk drawer or do literally anything other than change a password and immediately “forget” what it was.
Again, none of this is going to reflect well on the mayor as he faces these charges in court. Any judge will see it the way the rest of us see it: a deliberate attempt to thwart a federal investigation.
Even so, let’s hope this doesn’t result in any stupid precedent motivated by the mayor’s apparently willful attempt to obstruct this investigation. There’s some potential here for rulings that might negatively affect Fifth Amendment rights and/or give the feds leverage to agitate for compelled assistance from phone manufacturers.
Because there’s a chance it might do any of these things. The FBI has had the phone for a long time. And it still hasn’t managed to access its contents. The FBI insists (without supporting evidence, obviously) that this is a BIG DEAL that might BREAK THE CASE.
During a federal court hearing, prosecutor Hagan Scotten said the FBI’s inability to get into Adams’ phone is a “significant wild card,” according to a report from the New York Post.
I want to believe that might be true. But only because I want the feds to deliver a ton of incriminating evidence that takes down Mayor Adams and anyone else in his administration who engaged in corruption. On the other hand, the FBI always claimsany phone it can’t get into must be loaded with incriminating evidence capable of producing slam-dunk prosecutions. The FBI’s anti-encryption agitation relies on its fervent belief that the best and most incriminating evidence is always found on encrypted devices, therefore courts should force companies (or accused persons) to decrypt the contents so special agents can open and close investigations without ever leaving their desks.
I’m definitely here for the fallout. I’m guessing these raids will lead to a string of resignations, a cooperating witness or two, and a few wrist slaps for ex-law enforcement officials. But if someone’s going to burn for this, it should be the person at the top of the city food chain. And as much as I’d like to see that happen, I’d much rather it was accomplished without collateral damage to Ccnstitutional rights or the security and privacy provided by strong encryption.
The most powerful entity in New York City isn’t the Mayor. Or City Hall. It has always been the NYPD, which has never been overseen by anyone who could remotely be considered capable, much less willing, to hold the department accountable, at least not in my lifetime. The chain of succession at City Hall over the past 40 years runs from Ed Koch to Rudy Giuliani to Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio, with a brief stop for David Dinkins, who was quickly kicked to the curb by open bigotry and powerful police unions when it became clear he might actually try to introduce stronger accountability measures.
Bill de Blasio was the only mayor to be roundly rejected by the NYPD, and even that rejection was only temporary. Everyone in this chain of commanders has done everything they can to protect the NYPD. The present mayor may be the worst so far — a company man whose years of service as an NYPD officer have made him more deferential than most.
New York City hasn’t quite reached the levels of corruption that has made Chicago (in)famous, but it’s going to keep trying! With each passing year and election of an NYPD-worshiping mayor, the level of corruption increases. Believing otherwise is pure denialism.
And now, the mayor whose buddies in the cop shop (some current, some former) led him to deploy a gun-detection system the system’s developer has admitted won’t actually work where it’s being deployed (NYC’s subway system) is now at the center of another classic NYC clusterfuck. Here’s ABC News with more details:
The FBI conducted searches at the homes of two of New York City Mayor Eric Adams‘ closest aides on Thursday, sources familiar with the investigation told ABC News.
The Hamilton Heights home of First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, who is engaged to Schools Chancellor David Banks, and the Hollis, Queens, home of Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks, were searched as part of an ongoing investigation, the sources said.
That early reporting might make it seem as though these raids were tied to a couple of outliers, albeit ones working very closely with Mayor Eric Adams. Later reporting makes it clear the problem isn’t limited to Sheena Wright and Phil Banks.
On Wednesday, in coordinated early morning raids, FBI agents seized phones and/or searched the homes of more than half a dozen senior city officials, including Sheena Wright, first deputy mayor; David Banks, schools chancellor, and his brother Philip Banks III, deputy mayor for public safety; Edward Caban, NYPD commissioner; and Timothy Pearson, mayoral adviser.
That’s multiple raids in one day, all targeting City Hall employees with close ties to Eric Adams. You’ll also note that one of the raid targets was the NYPD commissioner himself, Edward Caban — someone who has his own antagonism towards notions of law enforcement accountability.
But there’s a larger law enforcement nexus here. Eric Adams is a former NYPD officer. Philip Banks is a former NYPD department chief — one who resigned suddenly a decade ago when news surfaced he was involved in the bribing of several city officials. Adams liked Banks enough to give him a job, despite his immediately obvious ethical concerns.
Mayor Adams’ adviser, Timothy Pearson has his own issues. He held down a job at Resorts World Casino while simultaneously working for the mayor’s office. Pearson only exited his casino job after this double-dipping was exposed by the press. He’s also been sued four times for sexual harassment.
As for Commissioner Caban, he’s his own bag of trouble:
Commissioner Caban came under a cloud when it turned out his brother, Richard, was operating a Bronx bar and restaurant called Con Sofrito — a place where Adams celebrated his birthday and NYPD brass liked to party — in violation of multiple building and fire-safety codes and a judge’s order to shut down an outdoor terrace.
And yet, he’s still somehow the NYPD commissioner. And all of this comes on top of preexisting scandals, including multiple convictions tied to illegal fundraising for Adams’ 2021 mayoral campaign.
Eric Adams — a.k.a. Mr. Law Enforcement — doesn’t seem to be all that concerned about enforcing laws. His staff and political appointees are allegedly engaged in an unknown amount of lawbreaking. And that only covers the recent raids, which, at minimum, imply unlawful activity. There’s also plenty of confirmed lawlessness on the record.
“Investigators have not indicated to us the mayor or his staff are targets of any investigation,” the mayor’s chief counsel, Lisa Zornberg, said in a statement. “As a former member of law enforcement, the mayor has repeatedly made clear that all members of the team need to follow the law.”
First, the feds don’t need to “indicate” anything about the mayor’s staff. It’s already clear at least one member of his staff (adviser Timothy Pearson) is the “target” of an “investigation.” Second, what the fuck does this even mean: “the mayor has repeatedly made it clear that all members of the team need to follow the law.”
I have worked a number of jobs over the past 30 years, both as a subordinate and a supervisor. I have been told (or have told others) to “follow the law” exactly zero times over that period. This is not a normal thing for people to say. If it’s something you have to say “repeatedly,” it’s because you or the people you employ are “repeatedly” trying to violate the law or, as the case would seem to be here, actually violating the law.
Not that the NYPD is handling this any better following the raid of Commissioner Caban’s house. Its response to these events was to eject anyone asking questions or reporting on the raids.
When the Post tried to reach chief of patrol John Chell for comment about the raids and subpoenas,” the paper reports, “NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Public Information Tarik Sheppard got on the phone and called the reporter a ‘f- – – ing scumbag.’” Minutes later, the department reportedly kicked Tina Moore, the Post’s police bureau chief, out of the press room at NYPD headquarters.
Not a great look for anyone involved or anyone close to those involved. This is going to get extremely interesting extremely quickly. Friends, cohorts, and actual employees of the mayor and his office have already been on the receiving end of FBI raids. It’s only a matter of time before the bell tolls for the mayor himself. Even if Adams was smart enough to generate some plausible deniability, someone under investigation is going to roll over and offer up enough evidence to pierce this façade. Mayor Adams may ultimately survive this, but it’s going to leave permanent scars.
The overarching theme, however, is something we’ve seen several times before: the people who talk the loudest about law and order are the people who most frequently decide laws don’t apply to them. Power corrupts, and those with the most of it are almost always the first to succumb to this inevitability. As for the city itself, I guess it’s time to try again when the next election rolls around. But history suggests Adams will just be replaced by someone equally terrible and equally subservient to the whims and demands of the city’s law enforcers.
There’s nothing more self-congratulatory than a government announcing it’s DOING SOMETHING ABOUT SOMETHING. That’s the New York City government at the moment, lauding its efforts to reduce crime in the city’s subways by installing tech even the tech manufacturer has stated isn’t capable of doing what’s being asked of it.
In mid-May, Mayor Eric Adams and the city government told New Yorkers something was being done. And that “something” was the installation of gun detection tech. Eric Adams (and I’m sure some city residents) appears to believe the city’s subways are awash in a flood of criminal activity, apparently forgetting the city actually has seen much, much worse over the years.
In addition to scrambling National Guardsmen to subway stations to police (state) passengers, the city has done a whole lot of handwringing over a perceived uptick in subway-related crime. It has also claimed the spike in fare jumpers presents an existential threat to city funding, which is a weird thing for an entity that has always paid for stuff with other people’s money to be saying.
The latest proposal is gun detection tech produced by Evolv. The problem with this supposed solution is that even Evolv says deploying its tech in subways is going to be of extremely limited utility. Georgia Gee’s scathing report for Wired on the tech and the company’s ties to Mayor Adams and several current and former NYPD law enforcement officials made several things clear.
First, this seems to have less to do with keeping subway passengers safe and more to do with pleasing people with high-level connections in the New York government, including the nation’s largest police force.
Second, this tech isn’t going to do what Mayor Adams and other city officials claim it will:
In an investor call on March 15, 2024, Peter George, the [Evolv’s] CEO, admitted that the technology was not geared toward subway stations. “Subways, in particular, are not a place that we think is a good use case for us,” George said, due to the “interference with the railways.
Not great! And it’s not entirely clear any future failures should be blamed on the rails. As Gee’s reporting for Wired notes, a previous test run at a Bronx hospital resulted in an 85 percent false positive rate.
New York City officials will begin testing gun-detecting scanners inside subway stations in the coming days in what they say is an effort to address riders’ concerns about crime.
The weapon-detection devices, produced by Evolv Technology, a Massachusetts-based start-up, roughly resemble the metal detectors often found at the entrances of courthouses and concerts. Representatives for Mayor Eric Adams, who announced the pilot, said that a single set of roving scanners would be used to search for weapons at various stations throughout the subway system for one month beginning Thursday or Friday. City Hall officials later corrected Mr. Adams and said that the pilot would begin on an unspecified date.
Speaking of not great, it’s kind of a problem when the mayor himself doesn’t seem to know when these devices will be rolled out. What’s worse is they’re being rolled out without guardrails. The city apparently has nothing in place to track the hit rate of these scanners. Nor does it seem immediately interested in engaging in any form of oversight that might let city residents know whether or not their money is being wasted.
It was not immediately clear how the city would gauge the pilot’s efficacy and whether there were plans to deploy the gadgets more widely. A representative for the mayor said that the city had not entered into a contract with Evolv and that it was not spending any money on the gadgets for the pilot. Officials have said that they are only experimenting with Evolv and that they are still seeking proposals from other companies with similar products.
While this may be a trial run of a proposed “solution” to what is only a perception of an increase in violent crime, there’s nothing in this statement that indicates the city won’t move forward with Evolv even if it does nothing to lower crime rates or even the perception itself.
Trials of products by government agencies generally involve some form of tracking to ensure the product delivers what’s been promised. In New York City, these baselines have been replaced by shrugs and vague assertions about “experiments.” But the word “experiment” means something. (Or, at least it used to.) It’s a scientific term that means current results will not only be tracked, but retained and compared to similar offerings from other companies.
But what’s being said here appears to be nothing more than vague assurances meant to stop journalists from asking further questions, rather than solid assurances that this is the beginning of a thorough process that will ultimately result in the best solution for the subway safety problem, even if that means walking away from gun detection tech entirely.
The most likely outcome is that Evolv will become a permanent part of the subway ecosystem. The company’s incestuous relationship with NYPD officials and the mayor himself strongly suggests the “experiment” will be deemed a success and the company granted a long, lucrative contract. And with nothing having been tracked during the supposed trial run, it will be impossible for anyone to claim Evolv’s system adds nothing to the security of the city’s subways. And that part is definitely by design.
Oh, man. There’s so much going on here. The headline is only part of it.
We’ll get to it (and through it) as efficiently as possible but expect multiple stops along the way. Georgia Gee’s reporting on this for Wired is devastating. There’s so much stupidity and wrongness going on here, the article almost reads like extremely dark satire.
A little background: for whatever reason, the current mayor and law enforcement officials believe the subways are more dangerous than ever, possibly because they’ve completely forgotten the solid two-decade run of horrific crime that began in the 1970s and only began declining to current rates in the mid-1990s.
Then there’s the transit authority, which seems to believe that it’s dealing with an epidemic of fare-jumping — one never before witnessed by an agency suffering from the same sort of long-term memory loss.
This has culminated in calls for AI to do everything from recognizing fare jumpers to detecting weapons carried by paying passengers and fare jumpers alike. The state government also surged some National Guard troops to man the perimeter (and interior), giving riders the added bonus of police state vibes as they headed towards certain doom by entering a subway car.
History has been forgotten, replaced by histrionics. Sure, it’s almost spelled the same but only one has any footing in reality.
And speaking of reality, this is where the mayor begins to detach from it. Mayor Eric Adams wants to test-drive gun detection AI created by a company called Evolv in New York subways. And he wants to do it despite company officials making it clear its AI will not perform well under these circumstances.
In an investor call on March 15, 2024, Peter George, the company’s CEO, admitted that the technology was not geared toward subway stations. “Subways, in particular, are not a place that we think is a good use case for us,” George said, due to the “interference with the railways.”
Nonetheless, this is the product Mayor Adams prefers. And it’s not entirely his fault. The company’s CEO may have been brutally honest about his tech’s chances in an undesirable environment, but the company’s PR reps were far less concerned. In fact, they were downright cheery, proclaiming Evolv to be a “mission-driven company” that welcomed the opportunity to fail publicly during a test drive in the United States’ most-used mass transit system.
That cheeriness also downplays previous tests of Evolv’s gun detection system in New York City, which haven’t exactly gone well.
Evolv’s technology was used to screen visitors in a city-run Bronx hospital, where a man had been shot inside the emergency room in January 2022. This wasn’t very successful—the scanners produced false positives 85 percent of the time during the seven-month pilot.
So, here we have a product that didn’t function well in an environment that had never been referred to by Evolv’s CEO as non-optimal. And we have a direct statement from the CEO that seems to suggest he’d rather test this tech anywhere else but the NYC subway system.
And then we have the mayor, who has ignored all of this to portray this tech roll-out as win not just for New Yorkers, but possibly for all mankind. I am not even kidding.
Despite this, following the death of a man who was pushed onto the subway tracks in late March, Adams announced that Evolv’s gun-detection scanners would be tested in the city’s train stations. “This is a Sputnik moment,” Adams said on March 28. “When President Kennedy said we were going to put a man on the moon.”
Jesus. I could probably do 10,000 words on the statement alone. I won’t. But I’m still going to do several.
Where do you start? Mayor Adams comparing himself to one of the most beloved presidents/starfuckers to ever hold office? The comparison of looking for guns on a subway to one of the greatest achievements ever in the human race?
How about the fact that the Space Race was originally about asserting dominance? That the space program became more useful scientifically doesn’t erase its origin as a dick-measuring contest between us and the Red Menace. We needed to show them we could do everything better, if only to keep the mutually-assured-destruction temperatures down as much as possible during the Cold War.
Is the mayor comparing subway scofflaws to the USSR? Is he insinuating that ensuring the safety of subway passengers is on par with putting US boots on the lunar ground?
What would installing more metal detectors be portrayed as? Sending animals into orbit? Or does Mayor Adams think that might be a bad idea? After all, police officers are at least as willing to kill dogs as commie scientists.
Or is it this: does he consider AI policing of mass transit a similar scientific achievement? “If we can put a man on the moon, surely we can put an algorithm in a turnstile!” What even the fuck.
And does the mayor really want to detect all the guns? Let’s not forget (as Mayor Adams surely has), this city loves a good guy with a gun. Bernie Goetz was treated as a hero for going all vigilante in a subway car. If you detect those guns, you might find yourself on the wrong side of history. (But that probably doesn’t matter when you can’t even be bothered to remember it.)
Self-aggrandizement aside, there’s probably another reason Mayor Adams is so hot for a product even the company’s CEO expects to disappoint in these conditions. The short answer is Adams like himself, likes cops, and likes anyone willing to let him still be (sort of) a cop while he’s officially the mayor. More great report from Wired’s Georgia Gee:
Back in 2022, Adams tasked New York’s deputy mayor, Philip Banks III, with finding a gun-detection solution. Before joining the administration, he served as NYPD’s chief of department, but resigned in 2014 amid a federal bribery and corruption investigation in which he was later named as an unindicted coconspirator. (Banks was never charged.)
While Adams said in May 2022 that he found Evolv online, Ozerkis from Evolv tells WIRED that the NYPD had contacted Evolv “to explore and test the possibility of using our screening solution around the city as part of their multi-pronged plan to curb violent crime.”
There was a lot of overlap with former members of the NYPD. Adams and Banks came up together as police officers—as did a then-account-executive of Evolv, also name-dropped by Chitkara in the email to the mayor’s staff. Dominick D’Orazio, who had been Evolv’s sales manager in the northeast US before being promoted to regional manager in April, was a commander in Brooklyn South whose reporting line included Banks—who was, at the time, deputy chief of patrol for Borough Brooklyn South. (Banks has denied meeting D’Orazio in his capacity as an Evolv employee.)
Yeah, it’s all deeply incestuous. And, because of that, it’s deeply stupid. The tech has failed frequently, including its deployments in schools. It’s gun detection tech that apparently can’t detect guns. But because the mayor and his buddies are deeply involved, it’s being portrayed as the next best thing to martial law by someone currently being completely consumed by his own hubris.
Countless sectors are rushing to implement “AI” (undercooked language learning models) without understanding how they work — or making sure they work. The result has been an ugly comedy of errors stretching from journalism to mental health care thanks to greed, laziness, computer-generated errors, plagiarism, and fabulism.
NYC’s government is apparently no exception. The city recently unveiled a new “AI” powered chatbot to help answer questions about city governance. But an investigation by The Markup found that the automated assistant not only doled out incorrect information, it routinely advises city residents to break the law across a wide variety of subjects, from landlord agreements to labor issues:
“The bot said it was fine to take workers’ tips (wrong, although they sometimes can count tips toward minimum wage requirements) and that there were no regulations on informing staff about scheduling changes (also wrong). It didn’t do better with more specific industries, suggesting it was OK to conceal funeral service prices, for example, which the Federal Trade Commission has outlawed. Similar errors appeared when the questions were asked in other languages, The Markup found.”
Folks over on Bluesky had a lot of fun testing the bot out, and finding that it routinely provided bizarre, false, and sometimes illegal results:
There’s really no reality where this sloppily-implemented bullshit machine should remain operational, either ethically or legally. But when pressed about it, NYC Mayor Eric Adams stated the system will remain online, albeit with a warning that the system “may occasionally produce incorrect, harmful or biased content.”
But one administration official complained about the fact that journalists pointed out the whole error prone mess in the first place, insisting they should have worked privately with the administration to fix the problems cause by the city:
If you can’t see that, it’s reporter Joshua Friedman reporting:
At NYC mayor Eric Adams’s press conference, top mayoral advisor Ingrid Lewis-Martin criticizes the media for publishing stories about the city’s new Al-powered chatbot that recommends illegal behavior. She says reporters could have approached the mayor’s office quietly and worked with them to fix it
That’s not how journalism works. That’s now how anything works. Everybody’s so bedazzled by new tech (or keen on making money from the initial hype cycle) they’re just rushing toward the trough without thinking. As a result, uncooked and dangerous automation is being layered on top of systems that weren’t working very well in the first place (see: journalism, health care, government).
The city is rushing to implement “AI” elsewhere in the city as well, such as with a new weapon scanning system tests have found have an 85 percent false positive rate. All of this is before you even touch on the fact that most early adopters of these systems see them are a wonderful way to cut corners and undermine already mistreated and underpaid labor (again see: journalism, health care).
There are lessons here you’d think would have been learned in the wake of previous tech hype and innovation cycles (cryptocurrency, NFTs, “full self driving,” etc.). Namely, innovation is great and all, but a rush to embrace innovation for innovation’s sake due to greed or incurious bedazzlement generally doesn’t work out well for anybody (except maybe early VC hype wave speculators).
