“Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority: Is There A Security Gap?” is the subject of a congressional hearing today before the House Subcommittee on District of Columbia, Census and National Archives. The short answer is yes. In their prepared testimony, WMATA General Manager Richard Sarles, Metro Police Chief Michael Taborn, Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier and Fairfax County Executive Anthony Griffin all reassure Congress that Metro is diligently working with local and federal law enforcement to prevent a Madrid-style attack.
Sarles points to Metro’s 20-man Anti-Terrorism Team, which uses scanning technology, physical barriers, intrusion detection systems, radiological and chemical sensors, bomb-resistant trash cans and more than 7,000 closed circuit cameras to deter saboteurs. But even with such an impressive arsenal funded with nearly $4 billion in federal grants — including $108 million Transit Security Grants between 2006 and 2010 — Metro still received 339 calls “involving a suspicious person, package, bomb threat or similar event” just within the last six months. Security is a long-term problem.
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It’s important to point out that while there have been no direct attacks on Metro to date, more than a dozen passengers and employees have died in preventable accidents, including the 2009 Red Line crash. Some might argue that Metro itself poses a greater risk to the public than terrorists.
Sarles obliquely acknowledges this by noting that the first billion of WMATA’s new $5 billion capital improvement plan — the largest in its 35-year history — will be spent complying with National Transportation Safety Board recommendations that the transit agency previously ignored. The second point is that mass transportation systems like Metro will always be a tempting target for terrorists, no matter how many law enforcement officers and security enhancements are employed. Since 2004, almost 500 people have died and more than 3,000 have been injured in four major terrorist attacks on mass transit facilities worldwide.
What probably won’t be discussed in today’s hearing is this fact: The federal government’s ongoing failure to secure the nation’s borders and its abdication of responsibility in enforcing its own immigration laws and visa programs have made the task much more difficult than it should be for Metro and all other public transit systems. As Lanier notes, first responders have been forced by necessity to become the nation’s “first preventers.” When Metro and other public transportation systems have to worry about terrorist attacks launched by people who should never have been allowed to enter or remain in the United States in the first place, the first and most important security gap becomes obvious.
