More eyes soon will be watching Metro entrances. The transit agency has won a $2.8 million federal grant to add 153 video cameras to Metrorail station entrances and exits, Metro Transit Police Chief Michael Taborn said Thursday. The cameras will allow Metro and the surrounding local law enforcement agencies to view the images, Taborn said.
“We can jointly see the comings and goings of people,” he said.
In the past, the agency’s cameras were inside the stations, not trained outward. The first exterior camera was installed at the U Street Metrorail station in 2006, according to Metro. Others were added to the Anacostia station. Then in 2009, Fairfax County and the District paid for 20 cameras to be added to station entrances.
The new grant will mean that most of Metro’s 86 stations will have their exits and entrances covered, Taborn said.
The transit system also has cameras on rail platforms and fare gate areas. A handful of garages and parking lots have them, and the agency has been putting cameras in buses and MetroAccess vehicles.
But earlier this month, Taborn testified at a D.C. Council oversight hearing that some of Metro’s internal cameras were 30 or more years old.
D.C. Councilman Tommy Wells noted then that quality of their images was so poor that police couldn’t use them to identify faces. Police couldn’t identify people in the videos taken when Smithsonian archivist Lou Stancari was killed by a train at Farragut North on Jan. 15, Wells said. Stancari’s death was ruled an accident by the D.C. Medical Examiner’s Office but transit police are still investigating the death.
Taborn said the new cameras at the station entrances would be “very high quality” color models. He also said he is hoping to get “smart” camera technology that can better identify faces. He expects the grant to be expedited so that the cameras could be installed within six months.
