He is a 16-year veteran assigned to the Transit Bureau.

He said the officer was from the 13th Precinct, not the Transit Bureau, and might have been unfamiliar with the procedure for quickly entering the subway system.

Mr. Safir added more than 300 officers and detectives to the Transit Bureau in late 1997.

In July 1999, the Transit Division once again became the Transit Bureau.

Transit Bureau: Officers patrol their respective Transit District precinct.

Senior officials with the Police Department's Transit Bureau were trying to determine what caused Miss Gonzalez to plunge from the platform.

The subways are patrolled by the New York Police Department's Transit Bureau.

There are 2,675 officers in the Transit Bureau, he said, compared with 2,757 in 1997.

That is 50 percent more than in the same period last year, according to Chief Kenneth J. Donohue, head of the Transit Bureau.

In that same period, officers in the Transit Bureau, who already used the hollow points, struck six bystanders.