The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) has secured $1.7 million in grant money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for continued police patrols.

“These funds are essential to our efforts to boost riders’ sense of security and prevent crime from occurring in our system,” said BART General Manager Bob Powers. “The grant money allows us to sustain the deployment of our Critical Asset Patrol (CAP) team for an additional year, while we continue to hire new officers to fill the 19 added positions prioritized in this year’s budget.”

BART’s CAP team consists of seven officers and one sergeant who are assigned full time to high visibility patrol on trains, platforms and in stations primarily within the core San Francisco underground BART stations.

Their presence acts as a deterrence to criminal and potential terrorist activity and the detection of suspicious activity.  Year to date the CAP team has been responsible for 55 arrests including cellphone theft suspects, active warrants, stay away order violations, probation violations, public intoxication and drug use and other criminal activity. 

Each CAP team member is trained as a Terrorism Liaison Officer and collaborates with other law enforcement agencies.  Since January they have run over 25 high visibility joint operations with the Transportation Security Administration’s VIPR (Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response) team. 

BART launched the CAP team in 2011.

Powers added that the BART Police Department has now hired 37 officers this year, compared to 24 officers hired in all of 2018.