LONDON – Mayor Bloomberg wants to keep more of an eye on you.
After a demonstration here that included surveillance on his convoy, Bloomberg said he wants to follow London’s model and dramatically increase the number of closed-circuit TV cameras used in New York.
The mayor said Big Apple residents must accept that they are under constant watch by video cameras – and he called opposition to such surveillance “ridiculous.”
“In this day and age, if you think that cameras aren’t watching you all the time, you are very naive,” Bloomberg told reporters at London’s City Hall.
“We are under surveillance all the time” from cameras in shops and office buildings, “and in London, they have multiple cameras on every bus and in every subway car,” he added.
“We live in a dangerous world, and people want to have security cameras.”
London has one of the world’s highest concentrations of surveillance cameras. An estimated 4 million operate in Britain.
“It’s ridiculous, people who object to using technology,” Bloomberg said during a meeting with the London’s head of counterterrorism, Chief Superintendent Alex Robertson.
“The cameras on subways and on buses in this day and age, we are way behind and we really do have to catch up,” Bloomberg said.
“The MTA . . . just has to get us this kind of technology. Americans are too exposed and there are some people that don’t like cameras, but the alternatives are so much worse,” the mayor added, noting that he intended to discuss the matter with MTA officials.
Robertson said Londoners’ trust had to be gained first.
“You have to maintain public confidence and people believe it’s for good not for evil. We’re not spying on them and we’ll only use it for good and not for evil.”
“New Yorkers innovate a lot, but we don’t have a lock on all the great ideas,” Bloomberg said after a meeting with London Mayor Ken Livingstone.
“We will be happy to follow Ken’s footsteps or in this case bus tracks because the world’s great cities like London and New York do have to learn from one another to meet the challenges of our time.”
Meanwhile, Bloomberg also said he wants to look into a high-tech traffic-light control system – which can zero in on a busy intersection and change traffic flow by changing the pace of its lights.