NYPD Considering Body Scanners to Look for Guns

It's like a strip search but without all the poking and prodding.

The New York Police Department is laying plans to introduce scanners to the force that would be able to detect whether someone is carrying a gun without having to frisk them. The New York Times reports that the NYPD is collaborating with the Defense Department to refine and implement the technology, which works like infrared imaging. The scanners detect energy naturally given off by a body. When there's an object blocking that energy emission – such as a gun, or a knife on the larger side, or an overly cumbersome wallet – it becomes easily detected by the scanner. The police plan on attaching the scanners to the top of police cars, although seeing as how the scanners are only good for a range of three to five metres for now, the scanners' capability is somewhat limited. The NYPD wants to get the scanners' range up to 25 metres, but the prospects of a roving body scanner prowling the streets of Gotham has the usual civil liberties groups complaining about that niggling little concern that such a device could be used to infringe the privacy rights of law-abiding citizens. (You might recall the uproar over body-scanners at airports.) At least the 5-0 have generally good-looking New Yorkers to scan. Pity the poor police in America's fattest city, Corpus Christi, Texas.