Radiation Scanners Identify Concealed Guns

The NYPD has unveiled a new "weapon" in its arsenal to fight illegal guns: a radiation scanner that can spot concealed guns from a distance — no need for controversial stop-and-frisks.

NYPD commissioner Raymond Kelly announced Wednesday that the police will soon deploy and test the portable radiation scanner on the streets, as reported by the New York Daily News. The high-tech machine reads terahertz radiation, the energy naturally emitted by people and objects, from a distance, allowing police officers to see through people's clothes and potentially spot guns.

"If something is obstructing the flow of that radiation, for example a weapon, the device will highlight that object," Kelly said.

The idea is to put these scanners in police cars or at notoriously violent corners and monitor passersby to see if any of them has a suspicious object hidden under his or her clothes. The NYPD showed a video of how this works at a Police Foundation breakfast on Wednesday. In the video, a police officer is standing on the street, wearing a New York Jets jersey. A superimposed image taken from a scanner shows a black object, which appears to be a gun, on his belt.

The scanner, which was developed by a contractor in conjunction with the London Metropolitan Police, is still in its trial phase. "We still have a number of trials to run before we can determine how best to deploy this technology. We’re also talking to our legal staff about this. But we’re very pleased with the progress we’ve made over the past year," Kelly said.

At this point, it's hard to tell how effective these machines will be. And the ACLU raised privacy concerns over these "virtual pat downs" last year. Some questions, for now, remain unanswered. Is being scanned randomly on the street a search without a probable cause? If it is, that would go against the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches.

In a statement sent to Mashable, New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman said that "any technology that allows police to peer into a person's body or possessions raises a lot of questions that have yet to be resolved. But to the extent that this technology reduces the abuse of stop and frisk that harms hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers every year, we're intrigued by the possibilities."