Cameras to watch Wall St., environs

Beginning next September, virtually every car, truck and human moving through Manhattan’s financial district will be seen by a network of closed-circuit cameras programmed to search for suspicious activity.

If you circle a “sensitive” location several times in your vehicle, a camera inside a police command center will signal cops or security officers to check you out.

If you leave a package for more than a prescribed time, say 90 seconds, another camera will sound an alarm.

Six years after terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center towers, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly is phasing in one of the world’s most ambitious security initiatives, modeled on London’s Ring of Steel.

The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, as the plan is called, will eventually include 3,000 private and public cameras trained on the area south of Canal Street and relaying images in real time to a new command center; more than 100 license-plate readers at bridges and tunnels and throughout the financial district; street barriers that can be moved into place automatically; and an undisclosed number of radiation detectors. The plan’s projected price tag, excluding radiation detectors, is $90 million.

Kelly’s goals are to protect the 1.7-square-mile stretch that is home to the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve and the headquarters of dozens of the world’s key financial institutions and to guard the city’s viability as a global financial center.

“New York is a tough city and it’s been very, very resilient,” said Brian M. Jenkins, a terrorism expert with the Rand Corp. “But the 9/11 attacks caused between $50 [billion] and $80 billion in insured damage and disruption, and hundreds of billions in lost business… . The consequences of another large-scale attack clearly are enormous.”