New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Official: With monitoring, cameras, state’s public transit systems are safe
Easing fears after a mass shooting earlier this week on a subway car in Brooklyn, N.Y., Gov. Ned Lamont said Connecticut is “as ready as we can be” should something similar unfold on public transit in the state.
Speaking at a news conference in Guilford on Wednesday morning, Lamont, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal and state Transportation Commissioner Joseph Giulietti assuaged concerns over the state’s preparedness, pointing in particular to the network of cameras on the state’s train cars and station platforms.
“With all the electronics there, all the monitoring, the cameras, you will be caught, and you will pay a price. That’s for sure,” Lamont said of Connecticut’s public transportation systems.
The comments were in response to questions regarding the safety of Connecticut’s public transportation, particularly the Metro-North trains that go into New York.
On Tuesday, a shooter set off a smoke bomb and opened fire on a crowded N subway train around 8:30 a.m. near a stop in Sunset Park, according to the Associated Press. Ten people were shot, and at least another 20 were injured in the mayhem or by smoke inhalation in the rush-hour attack. Four remained hospitalized Thursday, and all the victims were expected to recover.
But residents across the region were left in fear of their safety, especially on public transportation systems.
Frank James, 62, was arrested in Manhattan on Wednesday after calling a police tip line to share his location, according to the AP. He was held without bail on a federal charge of terrorist attacks or other violence against a mass transportation system. Giulietti assured the public, without getting into specifics, that Connecticut’s public transit is closely monitored. The DOT has a direct relationship with the state police, should any criminal activity occur, he said.
“When the incident happened in New York, for the first time I didn’t get my first call from transportation. It came in from the state police because the governor has us tied into the state police network who are the responders within the state to help support all of our safety measures,” Giulietti said.
“I put in that every one of our trains had to have cameras throughout the cars so that way there, we knew who was riding on the trains,” he said.
Giulietti confirmed that every train car in the state’s system is equipped with multiple cameras, but he declined to go into detail on the cameras’ locations and frequency for safety purposes.
“I don’t want to talk about safety measures that are in there or where cameras are or anything else because a lot of that has to tie into you trusting that we are doing the right things in terms of security,” he said.
While there are multiple cameras stationed throughout train cars and station platforms, the state extracts the footage only on an asneeded basis, Giulietti said.
Technological advancements continually take place, on the governor’s urging, as new advancements come along and costs decrease, Giulietti said.
“The good thing is that technology gets cheaper every single year, and the other good thing is I’ve got a governor who’s really into
technology, so he challenges us all the time with this,” he said.
On a national level, discussions of whether to add safety measures found in airports to the rail lines comes up occasionally, Blumenthal said.
“It is a national problem. We get intelligence reports about this stuff and our intelligence agencies, the FBI and all of our commerce departments, the TSA, feel our train stations are just more vulnerable,” Blumenthal said.
“We’ve invested a lot of effort, money, time into airports, which now have proved a lot safer,” he said. “But rail stations have proved more vulnerable, not in Connecticut more than any other place in the country, but from time to time there are proposals of the same kind of detectors that we have in airports, the same kind of security investments.”
Alongside the discussion of increased safety and screenings at train stations, Blumenthal said the issue comes back to gun control and the number of “ghost guns” popping up nationwide.