FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Press Release # 028 Sunday, October 4, 2009
MAYOR BLOOMBERG AND POLICE COMMISSIONER KELLY ANNOUNCE $24 MILLION IN HOMELAND SECURITY FUNDING FOR EXPANSION OF LOWER MANHATTAN SECURITY INITIATIVE TO MIDTOWN
Comprehensive Counterterrorism Program to Fortify New York City Financial District Will Include Midtown Manhattan
Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly announced the planned
expansion of the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative to include sensitive
locations in Midtown.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W.
Kelly today announced that the City will use approximately $24 million in
Homeland Security grants to expand the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative to
include Midtown Manhattan. The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative is an
extensive network of security cameras, license plate readers, and weapons
sensors knit together to detect terrorist threats and deter terrorist
pre-operational surveillance. The announcement was made inside the Lower
Manhattan Security Coordination Center, where police and representatives from
the private sector work together to monitor data that are collected.
“We
are expanding our state-of-the-art counter-terrorism coordination center to
include Midtown Manhattan,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “Protecting potential targets
is part of the comprehensive strategy we've pursued over the past seven and a
half years to defend our City. We devote 1,000 police officers to counter
terrorism duties every day, and with a combination of high-tech intelligence and
old-fashioned policing we are doing everything in our power to keep our City
safe from terrorist threats.”
“The Lower Manhattan Security
Initiative was designed to bring together the private and public sectors to
protect the economic heart of the nation,” Commissioner Kelly said. “The
awarding of this grant enables us to begin extending its scope to a large swath
of Midtown, where the same technologies and partnership at work in the Financial
District will be brought to bear on interests and infrastructure
there.”
Conceived in 2005, the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative
consists primarily of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, license plate
readers, and chemical, biological, and radiological sensors with the goal of
detecting terrorist threats and deterring pre-operational surveillance. When
fully operational, it will include data from several thousand cameras, a
significant portion of which are provided by private companies in the finance,
banking, commerce, transportation, and telecommunications industries. Plans for
the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative also include traffic control systems to
be used in the event of a threat or other emergency.
The Midtown
Manhattan Security Initiative will add additional cameras and license plate
readers installed at key locations between 30th and 60th Streets from river to
river. It will also identify additional private orginizations who will work
alongside NYPD personnel in the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center,
where corporate and other security representatives from Lower Manhattan have
been co-located with police since June 2009. The Lower Manhattan Security
Coordination Center is the central hub for both initiatives, where all the
collected data are analyzed.
So far, the Lower Manhattan Security
Initiative covers Canal Street to Battery Park from river to river, a 1.7 square
mile area in which the New York Stock Exchange, Federal Reserve, Brooklyn and
Manhattan Bridges, World Financial Centers, World Trade Center memorial site,
PATH train and numerous major financial institutions.
To ensure that
appropriate privacy protections exist, the NYPD has developed a
first-of-its-kind privacy policy that provides for limited access and
appropriate disposition of stored data. The policy is available online at www.nyc.gov/nypd/downloads/.