New York Buses Get Security Cameras

Hundreds of Manhattan buses will be outfitted with surveillance cameras as part of a security upgrade prompted by bomb attacks on public transit in London and Madrid.

New York City Transit officials said the initiative will begin to bring New York into line with other big cities that have put cameras on buses and trains in recent years.

The effort will be the city´s first major attempt to conduct regular video surveillance on either trains or buses since an abandoned pilot program involving about 100 Bronx area buses in the late 1990s.

These are different times, and this program may have more staying power, although authorities are quick to say they do not expect the main value of the system will be an ability to detect or deter would-be bombers.

The cameras, positioned around the bus and its exits, will probably record common criminals, such as vandals etching graffiti on bus windows and purse snatchers.

Everything the cameras see will be digitally saved for 45 days and then erased.

Transit security personnel will not be monitoring the images in real-time, meaning that their primary value, other than as a deterrent, will be allowing investigators to see what happened inside a bus after a crime has already been committed.