The city intends to replace all of its Eye in the Sky video cameras this year with colour, higher-definition technology.
Administration will submit the recommendation to city council on Monday as it presents its annual audit of the surveillance system that keeps watch over the city’s downtown cores.
Thirteen of the 16 cameras were to have been released last year but administration found the city's existing cameras are no longer available.
Delaying the purchase has allowed the city’s central support division to look into upgrades.
“Our original plan for 2015 would have been to replace cameras with our existing technology, which would not have given us the quality improvements we’re looking for,” said the city’s manager of central support, Charles Campbell.
“The delay to 2016 will improve resolution and provide full-colour images. In conversations with police, there’s no question that the cameras we currently have at 2 (o’ clock) in the afternoon can do a pretty impressive job of capturing detail but at 2 (o’clock) in the morning with the light issues, they aren’t. We’re certainly expecting an improvement with the new cameras on that.”
It’s not yet clear how much replacement cameras will cost.
The Eye in the Sky audit shows the cameras captured 271 incidents of interest to police in 2015, 31 more they caught the year before and 98 more than they observed in 2013.
The Victoria Avenue and Brodie Street intersection accounted for 111 of the 326 times cameras were used to identify “suspicious activity” in 2015.
The Water Street Terminal was the second hot spot with 88 incidents and the corner of May Street and Victoria Avenue was viewed 58 times.
The corner of Simpson Street and Victoria Avenue was viewed only once, as was the camera at 215 Red River Road.
Campbell claims capturing crime through video surveillance accounted for 58 arrests in 2015, 19 of which resulted in video presentations as evidence in criminal court proceedings. Campbell believes the scope of assistance the system provided to police exceeds those formal figures.
“Although video evidence may not be a deciding factor in a court situation, at times the operators are on and they identify incidents, then police are able to respond and actually be on-site to do arrests,” he said.
“So sometimes they either don’t need video evidence or although the video evidence didn’t capture detail, the police presence was able to identify people who are charged.”
Since Eye in the Sky was launched in 2005, the city has always argued the presence of video surveillance serves as a deterrent to crime. Campbell stands by that assertion a decade later, despite year-over-year increases in the number of incidents the system captures.
He argued the quantifiable kind of crime appearing on video is different than the unquantifiable incidents that may never have taken place because the system exists.
While only two per cent of incidents captured on camera are listed as property crime (including vehicles) and one per cent was related to theft, 52 per cent of incidents related to drugs and alcohol and an additional 27 per cent involved assault.
“The reality of how much we’re avoiding is, it would be really tricky to figure out what didn’t happen. We do believe there definitely still is a deterrence value,” he said.
“The reality is, when you see the increases, you see them in the areas of alcohol, substance abuse, assault, which often have a component to it. The deterrence value of a camera system is generally for people who have premeditated intentions or are paying attention to what’s going on.
“The reality is, the incidents we find, a lot of the time, are driven by people who might not be as necessarily as sensitive to what’s going on around them due to alcohol or substance challenges they’re facing.”
