The New York Police Department thinks it may have caught the wannabe Times Square car bomber on tape — and is hoping to use a $24 million phalanx of surveillance cameras to stop future attacks in midtown Manhattan. It’s a goal that’s unlikely to be reached anytime soon. New York’s original spycam array is running behind schedule. And the track record of large, metropolitan surveillance networks pre-empting terrorists is weak, at best.
“NYC is a high risk area,” New York officials note in a homeland security grant request, obtained by City Limits magazine. “One threat in particular involves a vehicle-borne improvised explosive” — a car bomb.
In 2006, the New York Police Department announced a three-year, $106 million plan that promised to prevent attacks on New York’s financial district with a web of license-plate readers, chemical sniffers, radiation detectors and 3,000 publicly and corporately owned cameras. All the information would then be channeled into a single coordination center. Specialized video intelligence algorithms would be used to spot would-be attackers as they case their targets. “This is aboutidentifying and eliminating a threat, rather than dealing with the consequences,” NYPD assistant chief John Colgan told me as planning for this Lower Manhattan Security Initiative got underway. “I’m not in the consequence-management business.”
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