Smile, you're on the New York subway and they're watching you.
That could be an advertising slogan before the deployment of electronic eyes that is coming in the main transport and backbone of the Big Apple. Faced with the growing sense of insecurity experienced by New Yorkers when moving underground, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) announced the installation of two cameras in each of the 6,455 service cars.
There are writers whom the passage of time buries in absolute oblivion, as if all their sentences were erased or diluted. Others, on the other hand, remain valid and are as current as if it were the day their work was published. George Orwell is one of these. In 1949 he released his novel 1984, but, as things stand, that figure could perfectly be changed for the fall of 2022.
“You are going to be hunted if you do any activity, be it a violent act or a crime,” New York State Governor Kathy Hochul warned in the presentation.
In case the warning hadn't been clear, he amplified it a little more. “Do you think Big Brother is watching you on the subway? You are totally right, that is our intention, which is to give people great peace of mind,” the governor remarked.
Any student of 1984 could conclude that Hochul had understood Orwell's work in a way that was inversely proportional to the author's intention, whose dystopia is an allegorical denunciation of the subjection of citizens to mass surveillance and political and social repression. Literary and visionary.
This initiative, experimented in a pilot program since last June in a hundred units, has a clear objective. It tries to attract citizens who abandoned the metro during the pandemic and who now find it dangerous to return due to increased pressure from crime or the spread of misconduct.
It is no longer just that sense of risk, with random attacks suffered by travelers, but also the proliferation of the homeless - their appearance and stench scares many - and the realization that it is tolerated that there are those who drink, urinate and, above all, everything, smoke inside the wagons, something unimaginable recently.
In April, a gunman opened fire on a unit on the N line in Brooklyn. He left a dozen injured and an alarm of tragedy in the making. Six weeks later, one man killed another on the Q line, without warning, they didn't even know each other. Situations of people pushing someone onto the tracks have been repeated.
Lower level crimes, or petty offenses, dominate. The number of crimes remains in line with the 2019 data. But with only 60% of users, crime per capita has skyrocketed by 45%. Very few of the complaints end in arrests.
Expanding the pilot program due to its good prevention results, according to Hochul, the MTA will invest close to six million dollars, from state and federal funds, to install the cameras. All vehicles will have this device in 2025. The set of two electronic eyes, which require 40 hours to install, will monitor the entire wagon. Although it will not be possible to carry out a “live” control, it will make it easier to offer evidence to investigators of possible crimes.
This resource seeks to convince New Yorkers that the subway is safe again. It is also a matter of economic survival. The level of users is still much lower than before the covid. The MTA estimates a $2.5 billion shortfall by 2025 if revenues are not recovered.
Civil rights groups lashed out at the show, calling it "theater security."
"New Yorkers want security, not surveillance," replied Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the nonprofit Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “As the governor admitted –he added–, crimes in the subway go down, they don't go up. Big Brother espionage has never prevented crime before and it will be no different now.”
