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MTA Introduces New Security Ads

Building on the success of its widely recognized “See Something, Say Something” security awareness advertising campaign, the MTA has unveiled a new series of posters that reinforce the effort to enlist customers to join the police and MTA employees as the eyes and ears of the system.

The new in-system posters present photographs that show bags left in various transit locations on subways, trains, buses, and platforms and add a new element: Be Suspicious of Anything Unattended. Their goal is to raise customer awareness of the types of potential threats and to report such items to an MTA employee, a police officer, or the anti-terrorism hotline, 888-NYC-SAFE.

The posters draw on the lessons transportation officials have learned in the past two years, especially from meetings with transportation officials from Madrid after the March 11 railroad bombings, said MTA Executive Director Katherine N. Lapp. According to William A. Morange, the MTA’s director of security, officials in Madrid said that several passengers interviewed after the bombings remembered seeing the unattended knapsacks that turned out to contain the bombs, but did not alert anyone.

The posters feature a bright yellow-orange background.

The MTA expects that the new campaign will lead to many reports that prove harmless—a result it is willing to live with—and are working to find ways, especially in the subway system, to minimize the schedule delays they cause when police officers and bomb-sniffing dogs are called in to investigate. Since March, the MTA has received many more calls, and its bomb-sniffing K-9 units, which respond to calls of suspicious packages in Metro-North Railroad and Long Island Rail Road stations, Grand Central Terminal, and Penn Station, have been increasingly busy. They responded to 71 calls in January, 104 in March, and 124 in April.

Since 2001, the MTA has increased its police force by 39 percent, or 200 people, Ms. Lapp said. It has also established a counterterrorism task force that consults regularly with law enforcement agencies and reviews threats against the system.

In the longer term, the MTA is planning to implement new security-related construction using $591 million in security funding it recently received from the federal and state governments.

The ad campaign was developed by Kory Kay and Partners, which created the original “If you see something, say something,” campaign in 2002.

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