NYC anti-terror cameras

Video surveillance has many limitations, as seen during the recent bombing scare in NYC. Surveillance has certainly improved vastly since 9/11, but in the case of the Times Square attempted bombing, the man captured on video surveillance was not the person eventually apprehended.

Footage was shot by a tourist and police describe it as “more illuminating.” New York officials have committed to spending $110 million to add video cameras in midtown Manhattan.

Civil liberties groups note that surveillance networks in the Times Square case neither prevented the attack nor led investigators immediately to a perpetrator. Questions are being raised about both the cost to the public treasury and whether intensive surveillance is worth the intrusion into private lives.

Britain might have installed the most pervasive video surveillance of any country in the world, but the British experience does not provide much of an endorsement for advocates of video surveillance in cities. Chief Inspector Mick Neville, head of the visual images unit at New Scotland Yard, said cameras had helped solve "only 3 percent of street robberies in London," according to one published account. Says Neville and other British critics, the footage from street cameras is "often poor" and that police officers are not eager to wade through reams of images to solve routine crimes.

The NYPD has launched its own ambitious plan for a network of surveillance cameras to combatterrorism and detect suspicious behavior in lower and midtown Manhattan, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has said.

Speaking at the Association for a Better New York, Kelly detailed the initiative featuring cameras so sophisticated that they can zero in on an unattended briefcase or pinpoint suspects by the color of their jackets.

The city’s main operation is housed in a lower Manhattan central coordination center, which processes any perceived threats and can dispatch police to investigate.

"We now have about 450 out of a planned network of 3,000 cameras feeding into our lower Manhattan security-coordination center," Kelly added.

Last May, the department announced that the system,  modeled after the "Ring of Steel" in London, would expand north and blanket a 30-block radius from 30th to 60th streets in midtown Manhattan.