IF A TERRORIST group decided to launch an attack on the Bay Area, BART would certainly be among the possible targets. But sending BART police SWAT teams to patrol the trains, armed with powerful assault weapons, gas masks, and riot gear, will do very little to protect the public against any reasonably foreseeable attack. Instead, the SWAT teams frighten passengers and present an alarming image of military-style occupation that does more harm than good. It's yet another case study in the lack of effective civilian oversight for the 204-member force.

The SWAT teams are equipped with M4 and AR-15 assault rifles. BART police commander Maria White told the Bay Guardian it's expensive to deploy the teams, but she couldn't specify the exact cost.

White insists the primary goal is deterrence, and she says the high-profile patrols make BART a less attractive target. But almost nobody thinks a terrorist attack will involve a heavily armed militia assaulting the trains; in other countries transit attacks have involved lone suicide bombers, hidden explosives, or poison gas. And if cops are at all a deterrent to that sort of attack, the presence of regular uniformed officers ought to be just as good. As BART board member Roy Nakadegawa told us, "this is total overkill.... Terrorists don't operate in gangs, so why do [the cops] need automatic rifles that shoot off 24 to 30 shells?"

This might be little more than a harmless, if pointless, display of fancy hardware and paramilitary might if it weren't for the fact that BART police have a history of shooting people with only the most shaky justification. In 1992 a BART cop shot and killed an unarmed 19-year-old man who was walking away. The shotgun shells blasted Jerrold Hall in the back of the head and violated just about every known rule of the use of deadly force by police officers. Yet the cop, Fred Crabtree, wasn't even reprimanded. In 2001 BART cop David Betancourt shot an unarmed, naked man who was severely mentally ill. The cop claimed self-defense, and BART authorities called it a justifiable killing (see "Gun Crazy," 10/17/01).

The big problem is that, unlike San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland cops, the BART police operate with essentially no civilian oversight. BART has no police review commission, no procedure for citizens to complain (other than to the cops themselves), and no formal review of these incidents by anyone other than police brass.

The presence of all those riot-equipped cops on the trains is a daily reminder of the utter, inexcusable failure of the BART board to create a civilian agency or panel to set policy for and monitor the behavior of the BART police. We're sick of waiting.