Back in March, Deputy New York Police Department Commissioner Richard Falkenrath spoke in front of Congress about the federal government’s woefully inadequate contributions to NYC’s anti-terror funding. Today, the government acknowledging that it was listening.
According to a report on CBS, the Department of Homeland Security is set to announce that New York City with get $52 million for security. A large portion of that – $37 million, to be exact – will go toward securing the city’s subway systems.
On the surface, this is good news. More anti-terror funding for a very insecure subway system is always a step in the right direction. All things considered, $37 million is but a drop in the bucket. This money hardly addresses Falkenrath’s original points – that more people are needed for subway security, that airlines get $7 a person while subways get about 1.5ยข per person.
The bottom line is that New York City’s subways remain a viable target much like the subways in Madrid and London were over the last few years. We’ll gladly take the money, but it’s more of a token gesture than a move to shore up subway security. Hopefully, we won’t have to learn the hard way that the federal government, so bent on its anti-terror message, should be doing more to secure our tunnels.
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[…] New Yorkers riding the subway each day tend to forget that the subways are a very viable target and that they aren’t really secure. Various security projects are falling months behind schedule, and New York City’s transit infrastructure has long been stiffed by Homeland Security. […]