NYC Subway Becomes Home To Improved Security
In what officials describe as a first for a U.S. mass transit system, teams of police officers armed with submachine guns and bomb-sniffing dogs will soon begin daily patrols of the busiest sections of New York City subways.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has said that a major boost in funding from the Department of Homeland Security made the extra protection possible for the city’s vast subway system, long considered a potential target for terrorists.
“Whether conventional crime or terrorist threat, we will not let our guard down,” Kelly said at a news conference at Grand Central Terminal, where officials announced the increase in security dollars.
According to the Associated Press, officials have said that teams comprised of a sergeant, five officers and a bomb-sniffing dog will circulate each day on subway platforms and trains, focusing on stations below Grand Central, Penn Station, Herald Square and other high-traffic spots.
In recent years, similar so-called Hercules units — distinguished by their special black uniforms, helmets and body armor — have patrolled above ground around Wall Street and landmarks such as the Empire State building as part of the NYPD’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Kelly said the new measure makes sense since “the subway system has been the target of several terrorist plots.”
Among the threats cited by the NYPD: A reported plot by al-Qaida terrorists to kill thousands of New Yorkers by spreading cyanide gas in the subway; a thwarted scheme to blow up the Herald Square station in 2004; and the discovery by investigators in the 2004 Madrid train bombing of a crude diagram of Grand Central Terminal on a computer disk seized from one of the suspect’s homes.
Kelly was joined at the news conference by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who announced that transit systems in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey will receive $151.2 million in new grant money — an increase of more than 50 percent from last year’s figure of $98 million.
Explaining the increase, Chertoff said law enforcement officials in the three states “have to deal with vulnerabilities and threats in this region that are really second to none.”
Kelly later told The Associated Press that an unspecified portion of the additional money would pay for the new subway initiative, called Operation Torch.
Within three weeks, “You’ll see officers with automatic weapons, you will see additional bomb-sniffing dogs funded by this program,” he said.
NYPD officials said they believed that no other city in America had taken a comparable counterterrorism measure for mass transit. The department’s transit division already conducts random bag checks and inspections of subway tunnels and ventilation systems in search of explosive devices.