Metro is planning to put video cameras in a handful of rail cars, plus lay the groundwork for them to be added eventually to all trains.
The transit agency has budgeted $7.1 million of a federal grant to add a “small number” of cameras in about half a dozen rail cars, according to Metro spokesman Dan Stessel.
The money also will help the agency build a back-end network so operations officials and police can watch these and any future cameras in real time, he said.
Metro already has cameras trained on riders and drivers in its buses. Cameras film some station entrances, and the agency plans to add more to cover every entrance in the system. They scan many parking facilities. Cameras are on station platforms.
But the trains themselves have been free of video surveillance, leaving a void for authorities as soon as passengers step onto the train.
Metro has said its existing cameras help deter crime and solve cases. They also use cameras to watch bus operators and MetroAccess drivers, catching them misbehaving and using them as a training tool for how to improve.
Recently, though, Metro has seen a spike in crime, driven by robberies of electronic gadgets frequently plucked from train riders’ hands as they sit in the cars.
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The agency has been planning to have cameras built into the new 7000 series rail cars on order from Kawasaki Rail Car Inc. Those rail cars won’t start running until at least late 2013, when the first phase of the Silver Line is slated to open.
The rest of the system’s more than 1,200 cars do not have cameras. The pilot program would retrofit existing cars with the technology.
But such cameras raise concerns among privacy experts who say that having a network of linked Metro cameras, plus new facial recognition software, would lead to networks of linked cameras like those found in parts of New York City.
“It’s basically going to be capable of tracking people everywhere they have cameras,” said Amie Stepanovich, legal counsel for the D.C.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center.
She said authorities have used cameras to record protests, discouraging people from exercising their freedom of speech. But she said such cameras haven’t been shown to successfully deter terrorism.
Yet crime victims and their families have praised Metro’s cameras. The family of a 22-year-old man gunned down on a Metrobus in October credited a bus video with helping police find two suspected shooters.
“I was real grateful for that video and for them to put it out there,” the man’s aunt, Chanel Preacher, told The Washington Examiner.
The first train cameras should appear by the end of 2013, Stessel said. It’s not clear which model rail cars will get them, but they will run on different trains around the system.
