If you're looking for a cop this New Year's Eve, you might try a BART station.
Hundreds of extra cops - including BART officers, Oakland police, and sheriff's deputies from San Francisco and Contra Costa County - are being called either to ride BART or patrol its stations into the early morning hours.
The Alameda County Sheriff's Office will add extra patrols to AC Transit, and many local East Bay law enforcement agencies have also agreed to be available on standby.
The beefed-up presence is in reaction to last year's fatal shooting of Oscar Grant, an unarmed passenger who was killed by a BART cop while being held facedown on a station platform at 2 a.m. New Year's Day.
The shooting capped a night of cat-and-mouse between cops and rowdy young partiers returning from San Francisco. In the days that followed, a pair of protests in downtown Oakland resulted in damage to scores of businesses and cars and more than 100 arrests.
Oakland police - who bore the brunt of the post-shooting mayhem - plan to be out in full force on BART and elsewhere throughout the entire weekend, with just about every sworn officer being called in.
"We want to make sure we have the resources available to us at a moment's notice," said Oakland police spokesman Jeff Thomason.
As for dealing with New Year's revelers, BART plans to add as many as 26 trains to get crowds out of San Francisco as fast as possible and before any trouble starts. The system will run until about 3 a.m. instead of the usual midnight shutdown.
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