City Moving Ahead With Surveillance Cameras, Kelly Says
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New York is moving forward with a plan to install a new citywide system of surveillance cameras, the police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, said yesterday in a hearing before the City Council’s Committee on Public Safety.
The system will consist of 505 cameras in 253 locations. Although details are being hammered out, Mr. Kelly indicated the cameras would be installed in two phases, first in Brooklyn and then in other boroughs.
“They’ll serve to reinforce safety in areas already stabilized by Operation Impact, and serve as a high-visibility deterrent and investigative tool in other outdoor, public places,” Mr. Kelly said. Operation Impact, which targets high-crime areas with an increased police presence, began two years ago.
In his testimony, Mr. Kelly said the cameras – which will cost $9.5 million – would be paid for in part by a $9.1 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security. The remaining $400,000 will come from city funds, the chief police spokesman, Paul Browne, said.
Despite outcries from privacy advocates, some key lawmakers are already on board, including Mayor Bloomberg, who said during his January 26 State of the City address that he would seek to install cameras capable of turning at the sound of a gunshot, “ensuring that shooters are seen as well as heard.”
According to Mr. Browne, cameras in public housing facilities are already a proven crime deterrent and tool for investigators. He also described a small surveillance experiment during the past two years on Fordham Road in the Bronx, where cameras mounted along the commercial thoroughfare enabled officers to stop a burglary in progress.
The new program Mr. Kelly described yesterday would likely include similar devices – marked as NYPD cameras and installed in places with little expectation of privacy – in areas of high crime, where they would complement other public safety efforts, Mr. Browne said.
Still, the initiative has upset the New York Civil Liberties Union, which spoke out against the cameras at the hearing yesterday. “It is incumbent on the City Council to develop a regulatory scheme,” the executive director of the NYCLU, Donna Lieberman, said.
“We cannot use this federal funding as license to erase the line between legitimate law enforcement and indiscriminate surveillance,” she said in a statement.
