A little more than a year after BART officials agreed to outfit every railcar with working security cameras, nearly a third of the transit system’s cars are still without them.

But not for long, said Alicia Trost, a BART spokeswoman. By July 1, she said, all of BART’s 669 railcars will be equipped with working cameras, “as promised to the public.”

BART officials made that promise to calm angry riders after The Chronicle revealed in January 2016 that less than one-third of BART’s cars were equipped with real and functioning cameras. The system’s remaining 470 cars were mounted with decoys.

The disclosure came during the investigation of a fatal shooting on a BART train after police admitted they had no video of the crime even though it occurred in clear view of what appeared to be a functioning camera.

Officials defended the decoy program at first, then pledged to phase out the dummy program by equipping all cars with operating cameras by an unspecified date. In July, they said the installations would not be completed by the end of this year. The work, Trost said then, involved more complicated wiring than anticipated.

BART maintenance crews have been making consistent progress, installing cameras nightly, she said last week.

“More than half of the new cameras have been installed,” Trost said, “and the number changes every day.”

That’s welcome news, said BART riders interviewed aboard trains recently.

“I’d like to see them done,” said Sue Mulvihill, 71, of Point Richmond. “There have been a lot of odd people on trains lately. I would feel a lot safer if I knew the cameras worked.”

Nestoras Karathanasis, 33, a bioinformatics engineer, lives in Oakland and rides BART to and from San Francisco daily. He knows that surveillance cameras are no guarantee against crime but said, “I think they’re good for protection in general. The sooner the better.”

BART purchased cameras and recording devices sufficient to outfit all 470 cars with four cameras each in August at a cost of $463,749, according to BART records. The project is on budget, Trost said.

Decoy cameras, which were merely empty housings with blinking lights, were intended to give riders a sense of security and trick criminals into believing they were being watched. The killing of 19-year-old Carlos Misael Funez-Romero on Jan. 9, 2016, put an end to that.

Passengers as well as some public officials were outraged to learn most cameras were fakes. Chagrined BART officials, who were about to start a campaign to pass a bond measure to rebuild BART, quickly abandoned the decoy program.

Funez-Romero’s killing remains unsolved despite the release of images of the suspected shooter, captured by station surveillance cameras, and a $10,000 reward.

The outfitting of BART’s existing fleet should be completed several months before the system’s new railcars start arriving by the dozens. The new cars will come with security cameras capable of providing live feeds to a monitoring center, though BART would need to install new communications infrastructure along its tracks for that to happen. Cameras in BART’s existing cars record footage that can be downloaded and reviewed by police.

As technology becomes more sophisticated and cheaper, BART is contemplating other devices, including license-plate readers, which could be used for parking enforcement in BART garages and lots. Use of such a device, however, would probably raise concerns about how else it might be used.

BART has had a difficult relationship with technology, law enforcement and civil liberties in the past. The shutdown of the cell phone system in its subways during a 2011 demonstration caused an uproar and led to a law that requires public agencies to get a court order before shutting down a public communications network.

BART is considering a policy that would balance security interests and privacy rights. The BART Surveillance & Community Safety Act would require its Board of Directors to grant specific approval for each new surveillance device after listening to public comment and conduct yearly reviews of their use. Misuse, or ineffectiveness, would require the board to alter or stop the use of the technology.

San Francisco’s Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit civil rights organization that focuses on the digital world, is working with BART to develop the proposed policy.

“Public safety requires trust between government and the communities served,” Adam Schwartz, the foundation’s senior staff attorney, said in a letter to BART directors. “To ensure that trust, we need a participatory process for deciding whether to adopt new government surveillance technologies and ongoing transparency and oversight of any adopted technologies.”

As for on-train surveillance cameras, most BART riders seem to have become comfortable with them.

“I’m a civil libertarian, but it doesn’t really bother me,” said Michael Gallo, 53, an El Cerrito attorney. “I don’t think people riding a BART train have a reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Benjamin Mertz, 29, an El Cerrito resident who teaches music at a Tenderloin school, agreed.

“We live in a society where we’re all being watched all the time now,” he said. “There are always going to be concerns about government and how it uses the footage. But that’s the world we live in.”

Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuan