Denouncing the Bloomberg administration as being reactive in its approach to security in the city’s subway system, the Democratic mayoral front-runner, Fernando Ferrer, unveiled yesterday his “comprehensive plan” for making New York’s public transportation system safe.

The proposal came a month and a day after terrorist bombings in London’s transit system killed more than 50 people, and weeks after two of the candidate’s rivals – Rep. Anthony Weiner and the Manhattan borough president, C. Virginia Fields – released similar proposals.

“The London terrorist attacks were a wake-up call for many,” Mr. Ferrer said at a press conference at the Borough Hall station stop in Brooklyn, on the nos. 2, 3, 4, and 5 lines.

“But we should’ve already been wide awake. Since September 11, 2001,we’ve known all too well how vulnerable our city is to attack,” Mr. Ferrer said.

According to a spokeswoman for the Ferrer campaign, Christy Setzer, this was the first time Mr. Ferrer has made a policy statement addressing safety in New York’s public transportation.

The former Bronx borough president criticized Mayor Bloomberg yesterday for having “relied solely on measures like random bag searches,” implemented after the non-lethal July 21 London attempted bombings, to thwart terrorism in the subways. Under the Democrat’s “comprehensive plan,” the solution to protecting New Yorkers from jihadists adds to the bag searches, among other suggestions: pumping around 800 more police officers into the subway system; installing closed-circuit TV systems throughout the apparatus of mass transit; providing enhanced bomb-detection technology, and improving communications in subways by allowing for better radio contact and cellular-telephone service underground so New Yorkers can make emergency calls on platforms, in subway cars, and inside stations.

Mr. Ferrer also promised improved training for police and employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that oversees the subways, so that they might better identify potential terrorists. Yet when asked whether, given his desire to more efficiently use police resources and to enhance identification of potential terrorists, he would support excluding 90-year-old women from random searches, Mr. Ferrer said he would not.

“You mean racial profiling,” Mr. Ferrer said.

“It is illegal in this city. One of the reasons why it’s illegal is because there’s a law against it,” he added, citing City Council legislation introduced by Philip Reed, Democrat of Harlem.

While lamenting that New York lags behind London and Israel in its counterterrorism capabilities, Mr. Ferrer said he opposed efforts like that of Prime Minister Blair, who has suggested combating terrorism before it reaches subway platforms by infiltrating domestic hotbeds of Islamo-fascism and eliminating it at the root.

Of his own policy for combating terrorists, Mr. Ferrer said, “I want to add more police officers, because, as you all know, the Police Department does two important jobs – keeping us safe from domestic crime and international crime as well.”

“Significant amounts of police resources have been devoted to intelligence gathering,” Mr. Ferrer said, “and that’s appropriate.”

In all, Ms.Setzer said, the Ferrer plan would cost approximately $1 billion, with $400 million of that to come from unspent MTA security funds, and the rest from the federal government.

Mr. Ferrer was flanked yesterday by a handful of Brooklyn elected officials, including Democratic Rep. Nydia Velazquez, who has endorsed his mayoral candidacy. Ms. Velazquez joined Mr. Ferrer in excoriating the mayor for alleged absenteeism in Washington, D.C., faulting Mr. Bloomberg for having failed to secure enough federal financing for counterterrorism measures in New York’s subways.

The duo also blamed Mr. Bloomberg for the apparent unwillingness of the MTA board – on which the mayor’s representatives are outnumbered by those of the governor and suburban county executives – to spend the state and federal funds allocated to it for counterterrorism.

Mr. Ferrer did not specify how he would succeed where he alleged Mr. Bloomberg had failed in obtaining federal security funds, beyond pledging to fight alongside the Democrats of New York’s congressional delegation to pry the money from federal coffers.

Those criticisms and proposals, while touted as a “bold initiative” by the Ferrer campaign yesterday, struck some of some of the Democratic frontrunner’s opponents as lacking in both boldness and originality.

On July 12, a week after the terrorist bombing of London’s subways, Ms. Fields, for example, offered nearly identical criticisms and proposals, at a press conference at the 169th Street and Saint Nicholas Avenue subway stop in Washington Heights.

And on the day after the July 7 London attacks, Mr. Weiner announced a six-point proposal for preventing a similar bombing in New York. Several elements of the plan were recycled from initiatives the congressman had trotted out prior to the attack, many from a policy speech on crime and security in May.

One of the proposals suggested by Mr. Ferrer yesterday – wiring all subway platforms to provide cellular service for New Yorkers looking to make emergency 911 calls – has been the subject of legislation Mr. Weiner, a congressman whose district straddles Brooklyn and Queens, has introduced in the House, a Weiner campaign spokesman, Anson Kaye, said.

Other parts of Mr. Ferrer speech yesterday bore striking similarities to Mr. Weiner’s policies. Indeed, in the printed supplementary materials distributed by the Ferrer campaign, a report on security issued by Mr. Weiner last year, and available on his congressional Web site, is cited as a source.

“We agree with Freddy that Anthony has really good ideas about how to keep our subways safe, and the more people who endorse them, the better,” Mr. Kaye said.

Ms. Setzer said that what distinguished Mr. Ferrer’s “comprehensive proposal” from his rivals’ plans was his pledge to create an Advisory Council on Best Practices. Mr. Ferrer would protect New Yorkers from terrorism by turning to “experts from security agencies, academia, emergency responder professional associations, and other transportation agencies” from other states and other countries, “in order to obtain cutting-edge solutions.”

According to materials from the Ferrer campaign, the council would “convene regularly, make recommendations, and report on progress.” Ms. Setzer said yesterday that Mr. Ferrer did not yet have in mind any individuals he would ask to serve on the council.

Joining in the criticism of Mr. Ferrer’s plan was the Bloomberg campaign, which lambasted the Democratic frontrunner for what it called his “use of falsehoods and subway scare tactics,” which a campaign spokesman, Stuart Loeser, branded “reprehensible.”

“We suspect that most New Yorkers feel Ray Kelly and his nationally recognized counterterrorism team,” Mr. Loeser said, referring to the police commissioner, “know a little more about keeping New Yorkers safe than a machine politician who can’t get his facts or his own positions straight.”

Mr. Loeser disputed many of the statistics used in Mr. Ferrer’s policy unveiling. In particular, the Democrat had alleged that crime in city subways increased by 17% under the mayor’s governance, and the Bloomberg campaign said crime had actually decreased by 16% over the past four years. The Ferrer campaign pointed to a reported increase of 17% in the first half of this year in subway robberies.

The mayor was also a vocal opponent of the Collins Amendment in the House that based the allocation of federal funds for counterterrorism on a formula unrelated to threat levels, Mr. Loeser said, and thus has not been absent in the fight to bring federal homeland security dollars to New York.