Audit: City's police cameras cost a lot, don't work

UPDATE: Mayor Nutter's chief of staff, Everett Gillison, said later Wednesday the Controller's information is out of date. Read his full response at the bottom of the story.

An expensive flop.

That's essentially the verdict in a 23-page audit the City Controller released this morning on the city's video surveillance cameras, which were first installed in 2008 to fight crime and violence.

City Controller Alan Butkovitz found that although the City spent $13.9 million already and has committed another $3.6 million for more cameras and repairs, less than half of them work.

"With the city spending millions of dollars on its surveillance program, it's extremely troubling to have to say that only 102 of the 216 installed cameras were properly functioning," Butkovitz said. "That means at any given time when crime is occurring around our city, only 47 percent of the city's cameras are able to capture criminal activity at camera locations."

Doing the math, that works out to a $136,000 pricetag per operating camera - not $3,017 as the city first estimated, Butkovita notes.

"This cost is exceedingly alarming, and outright excessive - especially when $13.9 million is equivalent to the cost of putting 200 new police recruits on our streets," he added.

The city has failed to keep warranty and maintenance records for cameras and other video surveillance equipment, leaving the city open to paying for services for which it already contracted, he said. Auditors also saw numerous unopened boxes of camera equipment at a warehouse maintained by the Streets Department.

Butkovitz urged city officials to reexamine whether the additional $3.6 million allocated for the program is absolutely needed and develop a plan to use the cameras to predict potential crime locations.

"Providing effective public safety needs to be our city's number one priority," Butkovitz said. "But it needs to be done in a cost-efficient method to ensure that every tax dollar goes toward efforts that properly protect our citizens."

Police spokesman Lt. Ray Evers couldn't immediately be reached to respond.

The mayor's chief of staff Everett Gillison said the Controller's information is out of date. He acknowledged that getting the cameras up and running has been a slow process, which started before Nutter took office, but said that the city has 70 percent working today.

"It is not news quite frankly that the cameras had gone down," Gillison said. "Now we're up to 70 percent working, by September we should be up to 90 percent working."

Gillison also took issue with the Controller's complaint that the cameras each cost the city $136,000, saying "it does not cost $136,000 per camera to run this system, it just doesn't."

Gillison said the process was slowed down because the original plan was to make this a wireless system, which wasn't feasible. After the administration came into office, he said they changed course to do a hybrid system, part wireless and part hard-wired.