New York To Install Surveillance Cameras in Every Subway Car

New York, home of the largest rapid transit system in the country, will install surveillance cameras in every New York City subway car by 2025, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced earlier this week. The move is aimed at increasing riders’ confidence in subway safety, Hochul said, as ridership numbers are still lagging behind pre-pandemic levels. It also follows several highly publicized crimes that have occurred in the transit system, including the rape of a tourist on a subway platform this month; a mass shooting on a subway car in Brooklyn in April that left 10 passengers wounded; and the fatal shooting of a Goldman Sachs employee on a train in May.

But the decision to install cameras on subway cars worries some privacy advocates, who say it will increase the level of surveillance of New Yorkers without necessarily making the subway safer. Subway stations in the city already have surveillance cameras. “It’s awful. This just seems like a terrible surveillance PR stunt just to boost ridership,” said Albert Fox Cahn, the founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), a nonprofit aimed at reigning in digital surveillance in New York. “We have no idea how they would be sharing the data with federal and out-of-state partners,” Fox Cahn said.