Stanley B. Chambers Jr.
Raleigh News & Observer
DURHAM, N.C. — Police hoped that the cameras lined up along Angier Avenue would be the latest technology to help them fight crime. They had visions of not only capturing criminals in the act on video, but also controlling the cameras remotely from police cars to keep ever-present eyes on the street.
But so far, after months of work, the video surveillance program has not produced one arrest, and its future is uncertain.
Documents obtained by The News & Observer -- e-mail between city officials and TelePort Systems Inc., the Baltimore-based company that installed the system -- detail a project filled with missed deadlines, recurring technological problems and complaints from police officers and city officials.
TelePort’s contract ended in October after the city spent more than $90,000 on the project. What the city got was a system of 13 cameras, but only six are used for their intended purpose.
Cameras were installed in the Angier Avenue area inside the “Operation Bull’s Eye” zone, where for more than a year officers have made extra efforts to reduce crime.
Surveillance systems have become a popular tool for monitoring traffic and deterring crime across the country. Chicago, New York City and most other major U.S. cities have crime camera programs, said Tod Burke, a Radford University professor who has written about surveillance cameras.
Cameras can help exonerate or convict a person, but they can also displace crime, Burke said. They’re widely used in London, where street cameras exist throughout the city. There isn’t a similar setup in a U.S. city because of privacy concerns, Burke said.
“People are under surveillance anyway,” he said. “They go into any store, and they’re under surveillance. The only difference is that right now, cameras are not on every street corner, but they’re in most major businesses. And people still go to those businesses.”
Durham’s project has had some benefits, said Jose L. Lopez Sr., Durham’s police chief. They’ve been used to track fleeing suspects in view of the cameras. In one instance, the cameras helped prove that a crime did not happen.
Lopez said the city would have wasted more money if it initially installed a citywide system. There were lessons from the process, such as the amount of power that the cameras use and how Durham’s layout can affect an outdoor wireless Internet system.
Lopez wished TelePort would have done more research regarding the city’s Internet use.
Darnell Washington, TelePort’s president and CEO, said the city should have done the same. The project didn’t work to its full potential because there wasn’t enough bandwidth -- the amount of data that can be transmitted in bits per second -- for the cameras, he said.
“We took the assumption that the bandwidth that was said to be available was correct,” Washington said. “Unfortunately, we should have checked, but the city should have known.”
Mayor Bill Bell thinks the pilot program was worth it because emergency operators have become an extra set of eyes for officers on the street. The six cameras that are fully operational are linked to Durham’s 911 center.
Bell, along with other city officials, was interested in such a system after observing Chicago’s surveillance program in 2006.
“There’s no question that it added another level of security for the area,” he said of Durham’s cameras. “Having those cameras that are working and plugging them to 911 has to be another level of eyes on the street we would not have had if the system wasn’t there.”
Installation of the cameras was supposed to take 50 days, with the test program starting in May 2007.
But city officials wanted the cameras on top of Duke Energy poles, which took months of court orders and negotiations. The utility company was against housing the cameras in containers that resembled transformers, so they were instead placed in bulletproof squares.
“This will make the entire project overt in nature and most likely will displace crime and not help us increase arrests,” said Jessie Burwell, one of the police department’s assistant chiefs, in June 2007 e-mail to city officials.
The cameras’ performance was erratic, and there were problems with officers viewing images.
“In my opinion, the camera system in its current configuration serves no purpose for law enforcement,” Officer R.C. Swartz wrote in a November 2007 e-mail message to Burwell. “The inability to see what is actually happening in the camera’s field of view in real time combined with the inability of the user to adjust the field of view in a timely manner makes the camera system useless for street crimes investigations.”
Months passed as Teleport solved old problems, then encountered new ones.
While e-mail between the police department, City Hall and Teleport regularly sketched out issues, Bell, during a June community meeting, thought all of the cameras were working properly and made a statement to that effect.
“They told me they can read the names off individuals’ shirts,” he said then.
The next day, Burwell, in an e-mail note to Reginald Johnson, senior assistant to the city manager, said the cameras “have never really been used for police operations.”
“The seven cameras on the old system are still being turned on at night in hopes that, if they happen to be working, they may record something that could help us solve a reported crime,” Burwell wrote. “These cameras are not being monitored because their performance is so poor they are not fit for police operations.”
Burwell decided to focus the test project on the six working cameras, but the problems continued.
As of Tuesday, emergency operators only have access to four of those six cameras, said James Soukup, Durham’s 911 director.
Washington, the Teleport CEO, says the city expected too much out of a pilot project, where mishaps and challenges are expected.
“We were bringing them new technology, and we made an investment in assisting them,” Washington said. “We gave them a reduced-cost rate at being able to understand and to be able to utilize the technology. We felt that they held us a little bit more accountable than we should have been for a pilot.”
Lopez isn’t sure whether expanding the project is worthwhile.
“I’m thinking maybe those resources could have a better return if they were channeled in different places,” he said, “such as more police officers or citizens on patrol units.”
Copyright 2008 The News and Observer