NYPD moves to cloak midtown with camera license plate readers, and radiation and bio scanners
The NYPD wants to cloak midtown with the same security blanket it rolled out for lower Manhattan: camera license plate readers, and radiation and bio scanners.
Those measures covering Manhattan south of Canal St. will slowly be applied to midtown, from 34th to 59th Sts., river to river, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told the City Council Public Safety Committee.
“We want to take that model, protecting the 1.7 square miles south of Canal and replicate it in midtown Manhattan,” Kelly said after the hearing Tuesday.
The NYPD wants $21 million in federal homeland security dollars to put toward the midtown project, estimated to cost $58 million.
Modeled after London’s “Ring of Steel,” the NYPD opened its coordination center last November, with cops monitoring feeds from 300 cameras and 30 mobile license plate readers in lower Manhattan.
The 24-hour center, based in a nondescript Broadway building, keeps tabs on high-profile terror targets such as the World Trade Center site and Wall Street.
Plans are underway to have some 3,000 cameras, public and privately owned, and as many as 96 fixed license-plate readers feeding into the center south of Canal St.
The NYPD is also looking to install permanent license plate scanners at each of the 20 crossings into Manhattan as part of an elaborate new safety scheme.
Police also want to install sensors to detect biological and radiological weapons.
The lower Manhattan plan costs an estimated $92 million. The department has already invested about $84 million to secure Manhattan south of Canal St., river to river.
It’s getting ridiculous in Manhattan. They recently opened the new 1, R, W station downtown at the South Ferry. Since then the NYPD has had a table set up to search people at least 50% of the time I’ve left work. Far more often than the old 1 station. I’ve yet to be stopped but mostly because I come in from behind them and they focus on the new entrance rather than the opened area coming from the R,W entry. I still plan on pressing my luck by informing the officer that since I’ve been denied entrance to the 1 I’ll take the R.
