BY Alison Gendar
The NYPD wants to cloak midtown with the same security blanket it rolled out for lower Manhattan: camera license plate readers, and radiation and bio scanners.
Those measures covering Manhattan south of Canal St. will slowly be applied to midtown, from 34th to 59th Sts., river to river, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told the City Council Public Safety Committee.
“We want to take that model, protecting the 1.7 square miles south of Canal and replicate it in midtown Manhattan,” Kelly said after the hearing Tuesday.
The NYPD wants $21 million in federal homeland security dollars to put toward the midtown project, estimated to cost $58 million.
Aside from iconic buildings that could be terror targets, many financial companies relocated into midtown after the 2001 World Trade Center attack, police said.
Kelly did not outline how many cameras, license plate readers or radiation scanners would be deployed in midtown.
The announcement is the latest in the NYPD’s attempts to use technology to scan huge swaths of the city.
Modeled after London’s “Ring of Steel,” the NYPD opened its coordination center last November, with cops monitoring feeds from 300 cameras and 30 mobile license plate readers in lower Manhattan.
The 24-hour center, based in a nondescript Broadway building, keeps tabs on high-profile terror targets such as the World Trade Center site and Wall Street.
Plans are underway to have some 3,000 cameras, public and privately owned, and as many as 96 fixed license-plate readers feeding into the center south of Canal St.
The NYPD is also looking to install permanent license plate scanners at each of the 20 crossings into Manhattan as part of an elaborate new safety scheme.
Police also want to install sensors to detect biological and radiological weapons.
The lower Manhattan plan costs an estimated $92 million. The department has already invested about $84 million to secure Manhattan south of Canal St., river to river.
Civil rights groups said wholesale scanning and filming of everyone entering a specific area goes too far and doesn’t insure safety, as London found out when its camera-coated transit system was bombed by terrorists.
Aftermath News 
