HSC weapons detectors panned by nurse after knives go undetected

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This article was published 05/03/2025 (185 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Health Sciences Centre nurse is questioning the efficacy of newly installed artificial intelligence weapons detectors after she was able to walk into the hospital with several sharp weapons.

The nurse, whom the Free Press is not naming, decided to test the AI detectors on Feb. 14, the weekend they were installed. She made it through with a ceramic knife and a metal pocket knife going undetected.

“It was just this knife that (security) had confiscated off of someone else. I walked through, and it didn’t alarm, it didn’t go off,” she told the Free Press.

The AI-powered scanners, made by Toronto-based company Xtract One Technologies, were piloted at HSC last summer. Xtract One won the provincial bid to have the scanners installed at entrances to the adult emergency department, the children’s emergency department and the crisis response centre.

The nurse said the hospital’s institutional safety officers do a better job at deterring dangerous items and people than the scanners.

“(The guards) give the illusion of safety,” she said. “I’m not sure that the weapons detector is making the difference.”

Xtract One CEO Peter Evans said the scanners are not 100 per cent effective, but the company works with its contractors to adjust the scanner’s sensitivity accordingly.

“It’s a balance of risk minimization versus risk elimination. It’s impossible to do a complete risk elimination,” he told the Free Press. “You’re trading off what’s the cost of the system and the staffing and eliminating as many weapons as you can, and trying to get find that sweet spot of balancing costs, balancing risk at the same time.”

A Shared Health spokesperson said HSC increased the sensitivity setting on the scanners on Feb. 21, giving the scanners the capability of detecting more potentially dangerous items.

Between Feb. 14 and Feb. 24, the scanners detected 21 “potentially dangerous items,” including pocket knives, nail files and scissors, the spokesperson said in an email.

Updated numbers were not provided by press time.

The spokesperson said the scanners have led to an increased use of amnesty lockers at HSC. Potentially dangerous items can be stored in a locker and returned to an individual when they leave the premises.

Two weapons detectors were used in the pilot project and Xtract One was ultimately chosen based on “several criteria.” The spokesperson did not disclose what the criteria entailed.

The scanners use AI to detect shapes of potentially dangerous items on a person and alarm security personnel.

Manitoba Nurses Union president Darlene Jackson said the scanners being unable to detect some items is concerning considering the number of weapons confiscated by security on a day-to-day basis.

Jackson has spoken with other nurses at HSC who say a patient made it through the scanners with a pocket full of bullets.

“If they have a bullet do they have a weapon that wasn’t detected?” she said.

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The nurse who tested the scanners has worked in HSC’s emergency department for nearly 20 years and said she sees knives, screwdrivers and other items confiscated daily.

She detailed seeing a patient attempt to gain access to the emergency room with a samurai sword hidden in a backpack.

The nurse said she would like to see scanners or security staffers stationed at the entrance to HSC’s ambulance bay, which she says is a point of mass admittance of people and isn’t yet secure.

A spokesperson for Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara deferred questions about the the efficacy of the scanners to Shared Health, which detailed other safety initiatives underway including equipping security staff with weapon detection wands, additional security (including 42 new institutional safety officers and the imminent hiring of another 21) and physical upgrades on campus including better lighting, new turnstiles and access controls at multiple parkades.

nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.ca

Nicole Buffie
Multimedia producer

Nicole Buffie is a reporter for the Free Press city desk. Born and bred in Winnipeg, Nicole graduated from Red River College’s Creative Communications program in 2020 and worked as a reporter throughout Manitoba before joining the Free Press newsroom as a multimedia producer in 2023. Read more about Nicole.

Every piece of reporting Nicole produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.