New York City Plans ‘Ring of Steel'

New York city is preparing to turn lower Manhattan into a "ring of steel" - to protect the nation's financial center from another major terrorist attack.

Mindful that the worst domestic terror event ever to take place on American soil occurred at the World Trade Center complex in New York's financial district, New York police are taking steps to protect the vital area. The New York Stock Exchange, for example, finds its home on Wall Street.

The "Wall Street Journal" reported Wednesday that the city's police force is modeling its security plans after London's so-called "ring of steel," a system of encircling narrow roads, few points of ingress and egress, and battalions of closed-circuit TV cameras.

New York law enforcement officials have been given special tours of the London safeguards and are reportedly considering building a similar security ring around lower Manhattan.

Paul Browne, the New York Police Department's (NYPD's) deputy commissioner of public information, is quoted by the "Journal" as saying that while it's "still too early in the process" to comment on specifics, police officials are indeed mulling the London model – with a special eye to more closed-circuit TVs in lower Manhattan and limiting and controlling entrances and exits into and out of the district.

Today, London, reacting mostly to the Irish Republican Army bombings of the early 1990s, features 16 entry and 12 exit points where the roads were narrowed and marked with iron posts painted red, white and black.

At each entry point, a camera scans license plates and sends the data to a computerized system that can flag wanted vehicles and notify a control room at police headquarters within seconds.

Last year, alone, the system screened 37 million plates and identified 91,000 positive matches for vehicles that were suspect.

Thus far, officials have not disclosed which, if any, lower Manhattan streets would be narrowed to create that district's own "ring of steel."

But the "Journal" cites a law enforcement official close to the situation as saying the NYPD's "ring of steel" plans may extend to midtown Manhattan as well.

As to cameras, New York City has already embraced them as key security tools:

A project launched in October of 2004 to install 1,000 closed-circuit cameras with 3,000 sensors in the subway system is well underway with expected completion in 2008.

A state-of-the-art command center to monitor the subway cameras in real time is also underway.

The subway cameras augment the already-in-place 3,100 closed-circuit cameras in 12 housing projects - with additional cameras in select parts of the city, including lower Manhattan.

New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly is on record as favoring the installation of yet more cameras, devices created that dramatically reduce crime rates in the housing projects.

Meanwhile, New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority's new chief - FBI veteran and former head of the New York field office, Lewis Schiliro - has promised to examine emergency response plans, including evacuations and locked subway doors.

"We are going to look at all that," he said.

Lower Manhattan boasts the densest concentration of subway service in America, with 18 lines and 19 stations. The collapse of the World Trade Center towers destroyed the Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) train's World Trade Center station and the eastern end of the PATH tunnel. There was also extensive damage to subway tunnels and stations.

"In creating the plan for the World Trade Center site, we are looking at best practices around the globe as we seek to create a new state-of-the-art security model," James Kallstrom, counterterrorism adviser to New York Gov. George Pataki and designer of the new World Trade Center site's security plans, announced in a recent statement.