A group of four teens punched and robbed a BART passenger of their cellphone on Wednesday night, fleeing the train at the East Dublin stop. BART issued a release about the incident, as KRON 4 reports, which was caught on surveillance video, coincidentally on the same day BART announced that they had completed installation of working surveillance cameras on all BART trains.
Further details about the Wednesday incident are not available, including the gender of the victim or the time it occurred, but at least it was caught on tape.
As you may recall, it came to light in January 2016, following a fatal shooting on board a BART train, that not all BART cars had working cameras on them, despite the presence of faux camera boxes facing every door with blinking red lights to further enhance the ruse. BART was forced to admit, following a Chronicle investigation, that the vast majority of the cameras were decoys, and among those trains that were equipped with actual cameras, some of those cameras were broken meaning that only 23 percent of BART's train cameras were actually functional. What followed was an 18-month, $1.4 million project to properly install cameras on board all 669 BART trains though we just learned yesterday that the camera footage isn't being broadcast to BART police and can only be seen in real time by train operators.
Paranoia about ne'er-do-well teens on BART rose considerably in April after a "flash mob" style robbery occurred at Oakland's Coliseum Station, and further investigation revealed that there has been a considerable uptick in crime on the transit system committed by groups of ne'er-do-well teens.
Previously: BART Promises Working Security Cameras In All Trains By July