CITYWIDE

Cameras To Make Debut On City Buses

Two MTA buses equipped with a new video surveillance system were on hand yesterday for a demonstration of the new crime deterrent. The buses are part of the first six-bus test fleet, which will expand to 400 in June, and will operate only in Manhattan. The $5.2 million video footage system has been installed in a handful of city buses that will monitor activity on board whenever the buses are in service. Recorded footage will be used only for record keeping, not real-time observation, and the tapes will be available for retrieval for 90 days. “This is critical in our efforts to hold down crime, address security issues, and follow up on accident investigation,” an MTA senior vice president who oversees the bus division, Millard Seay, said yesterday. Mr. Seay said he would like to equip the MTA’s entire 4,500 bus fleet with the cameras, but that such a move would require major additional funding from the MTA’s capital program or from any security-related grants. The surveillance system costs $10,000 per bus. “The program has an intrusive feel to it,” a senior attorney for the Straphangers Campaign, Gene Russianoff, said. “But given what’s happened in other cities like London, I think riders will be more tolerant of it than they would have been prior to 9/11.”

— Special to the Sun

Midtown Legal Hotline Is New Election Custom

As voters headed to the polls yesterday, lawyer Tricia Betterly headed to the phones. Usually enmeshed in the fine points of corporate finance, Ms. Betterly spent the morning fielding calls about far different problems: A woman in Kansas City, Mo., had been told she needed a utility bill to vote. A registered voter in Wisconsin had been told she wasn’t on the voting rolls, though she had brought her registration card. Over BlackBerries and binders stuffed with election-law specifics, Ms. Betterly and 30 other lawyers in a midtown Manhattan conference room looked up answers, logged complaints and pressed to resolve voting problems phoned in to 866-OUR-VOTE from 10 Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern and Midwestern states. Yesterday the conference room for the prominent law firm Kirkland & Ellis LLP was part of a national network of legal experts volunteering as votingrights advisers — an Election Day tradition quickly forged in the post-2000 political landscape. After the 2000 presidential election dispute drew volunteer lawyers from around the country, legal and civil-rights groups decided afterward to organize an ongoing effort called the Election Protection Coalition. Its hotline debuted in 2004. Yesterday, the hotline had fielded more than 12,300 calls by 3 p.m., said coalition organizer Barbara Arnwine. While the coalition’s hotline may not be unique, it can boast a certain advantage: Volunteers are mostly lawyers. That “gives us a certain amount of confidence in answering people’s questions” and helps get election officials’ attention when the coalition calls about a problem, said Marjorie Press Lindblom, a Kirkland & Ellis partner running the call center in Manhattan. “No matter what your politics are, you’d like to think everybody’s vote is counted,” Ms. Betterly, 30, said as she took a break between calls. “The phone calls remind you that people really take that right (to vote) seriously.”

— Associated Press

IN THE COURTS

Woman Hurt in Contest Sues Manhattan Bar

A woman who said she fell off a slippery bar and injured herself while dancing in a “Shake-It-Like-Shakira” contest is suing the Manhattan saloon that sponsored the competition. Megan Zacher, 22, of Delanco, N.J., fell at Calico Jack’s Cantina on 42nd Street and Second Avenue on July 8, 2006, suffering a torn knee ligament that required surgery, her lawyer, Lawrence Simon, said yesterday.

— Associated Press