BART’s security camera: an urban transportation stalactite.
Four of these bad boys are mounted to the ceiling of every BART train. I took this shot while standing face-to-screen with it. Although the back of its all-metal chassis tapers up, the front of it hangs down four inches, so if I stood underneath the camera I’d crack my skull. (Yes, a tool of public safety is privately violating my own safety.) I try to avoid standing by this would-be cranium crusher but it’s always placed near the train doors, and during rush hour that’s usually the only standing space available.
At least twice a week my head is directly in front of the lens, providing BART’s security team with 20 solid minutes of complete darkness. I assume one day a quickly braking train will create a violent jolt, and security will wonder why my video footage suddenly turned blood red.
But the joke’s on me because for the last 20 years nearly all of their cameras were fakes.
Although BART has functioning security cameras in their stations, over 70 percent of BART’s security cameras on their trains were decoys with blinking lights. They believed that the mere impression of surveillance was good enough to deter crime, as if criminals were basically crows who could be scared away by the scarecrow camera above their heads.
Their ruse was only revealed in 2016 when a young man was shot to death on a BART train and law enforcement asked to see the crime’s video footage, which didn’t exist. Oops. BART deflected any notion that protecting 127 million yearly riders with a blinking decoy was criminally negligent, and then immediately replaced every blinking decoy with an actual camera.
So now when I stand too close to the dome-cracker/video camera, I can feel truly confident that I’m actually impeding the public’s safety, warm with the knowledge that I’ve only been endangering myself for the last two decades.