Ping
Yes, BART cops are armed.
Yes, they are regular armed officers - with K-9 units and all the accoutrements. How often they actually ride trains is an open question. ;)
Yikes. It's been 30 yrs since I've lived in the Bay Area. Even back then they had cameras that monitored the station platforms. It'll be interesting if this was caught on tape.
I never could figure out why they called the Frisco Area Rapid Transit BART.
Fruitvale? Really? I still just call it San Francisco.
That's just a joke waiting to happen....
Deceased was 22 years old. This is a horrid event.
Guns and dogs. The dogs appear to be the better trained. My guess is that this is another one of those “accidental discharges” - and yes, they carry a certain Austrian designed handgun.
In the wake of 911 some of them were briefly issued M4s or CAR15s. Let’s just say that it soon became apparent that muzzle control was not a big part of their training. Nothing like some guy waving his carbine round on a crowded train.
What annoys me is that BART cops also have cars and you often see them driving around, from one station to another I suppose. Not sure why they can’t just take the train like the rest of us.
i remember when I was a teen and went to a county fair in Pleasanton back around 1970 or so and they had a mockup of a BART car there and the proposal of building the system.
Many people laughed at it said it belongs in Disneyland, jump 10 years later and I rode it all day at times, you get an all day pass for something like $5 and I just went all over the bay area, under the bay, on past Oakland, it had some pretty fast acceleration, too fast at first and there was problems galore, when the quake hit in ‘89 I think the tube survived.
I think overall its been pretty successful.