Not too many calls from people who saw and said something were all that important

Apparently, the MTA anti-terrorism tip line doesn’t yield too many leads. Raise your hand if you’re surprised.

In a rather amusing piece in Monday’s Times, William Neuman crunches some numbers and runs some anecdotes to find that no terrorist activity was reported but New Yorkers sure are paranoid. And, oh yeah, friends like to try to pull practical jokes on each other by reporting them as potential terrorists. Hardy har har.

Here’s what Neuman had to say:

Now, an overview of police data relating to calls to the hot line over the past two years reveals the answer and provides a unique snapshot of post-9/11 New York, part paranoia and part well-founded caution. Indeed, no terrorists were arrested, but a wide spectrum of other activity was reported.

The vast majority of calls had nothing to do with the transit system. Some callers tried to turn the authority’s slogan on its head. These people saw nothing but said something anyway — calling in phony bomb threats or terror tips. At least five people were arrested in the past two years and charged with making false reports. Eleven calls were about people seen counting in the subway, which was interpreted as ominous by some.

Those 11 calls mostly concerned Muslims counting prayer beads in the subway. At least our politics of racial profile and fear of Muslims is working!

More specifically, the numbers don’t quite add up. The MTA has claimed that 1944 people saw and said something. Police data but that figure closer to 109 in 2006 and 45 through early December 2007. That’s quite the difference, but, hey, we know how good the MTA is with counting.

The calls that were successful, according to Neuman, were related more to criminal activity rather than terrorist threats. One guy was arrested after the drunkenly called in a phony bomb threat against Penn Station and other calls to the anti-terrorist tipline that weren’t transit related resulted in a few fake ID busts, a firearms cache discovery and an illegal fireworks arrest.

I won’t dismiss outright the idea that the New York City subways aren’t an insecure terrorist target. They are indeed both insecure and a terrorist target, but with this information out, I have to wonder if it would be a better use of resources to seal the security holes instead of driving home paranoia with constant reminders about seeing things and saying things. In the end, people tend to envision threats that they don’t really see.

But then again, without this program, where would we be without this great story? Neuman writes:

A Brooklyn jeweler, Rimon Alkatri, was convicted last month of making a false report and faces up to seven years in prison. Mr. Browne said that in May 2006, Mr. Alkatri told a hot line operator that terrorists were planning a subway bomb attack. But Mr. Alkatri was charged with falsely reporting an incident and accused of making up the story to get back at some former business associates.

You gotta love disgruntled former business partners.