Ronnie Polaneczky: A dim picture of city crime

THIS IS ONE of those columns that began as one thing but turned into something else midway through the fact-gathering.

It started with a call from a Police Department insider who said that, on any given day, 40 to 50 percent of the city's video-surveillance cameras are not working.

As of yesterday, only 117 of 240 units were fully operational. Of the 123 remaining, a handful show blurred images or can't tilt or zoom. The rest show no image at all - including two dozen that were installed as far back as 2007 but have never activated.

"Residents see the cameras and get a false sense of security," said the insider, who requested anonymity.

"For us, it's aggravating when you're trying to do a job and the tools are there, but they're not working."

Police spokesman Lt. Ray Evers empathizes.

"We know from working with social media that publicizing video images can really help solve crimes," he said. "So it can be frustrating when the cameras aren't working properly."

Case in point: Last month, Rosemary Fernandez-Rivera, eyewitness to a homicide, was killed at Westmoreland and Mutter streets, in North Philadelphia. The shooter fled east on Westmoreland - right toward the surveillance camera at A and Westmoreland.

Unfortunately, that camera has been broken for more than two years.

Tenacious detective work, thankfully, led to four arrests last week in connection with the murder. Still, that's no reason, says the insider, to dismiss the problems of the surveillance system.

Sounds shocking, right? But here's where one insider's shocker is another's ho-hummer.

"That system has been a white elephant from day one," snorts a veteran detective. "The cameras are so high up, they can't focus on faces. At night, all you see are dark images that don't help in identification."

Besides, he said, those who monitor the cameras aren't catching crimes in progress; there are too many screens to watch at once. So even the ability to tilt the unit or zoom in on an image is dependent on someone seeing the crime occur in the first place.

But what about the camera's ability to record an image that can later be accessed by investigators? Isn't that helpful?

"If a crime [occurs] behind the camera, the recording doesn't matter," the detective said. "The cameras focus only in one direction."

Investigators have had better luck, he said, scouring crime scenes for video shot by private systems overseen by business owners and residents. The lighting is better, the cameras are closer to eye level and the units are usually well-maintained.

"The technology of private systems just gets better and better," concurred Capt. Larry Nodiff, commander of the South Detective Division. Two members of his staff are trained to download and enhance images obtained from various surveillance systems in parking garages, condo buildings, SEPTA stops and the like. "We've had a lot of success getting suspects off the street."

Indeed, most of the high-profile crimes in recent memory were solved with the help of private video, recalled First Assistant District Attorney Ed McCann.

* Like the case of police Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski, who was killed after his murderers held up a bank branch inside a Port Richmond ShopRite - a robbery caught on camera.

* The deaths of drug dealers Rian Thal and Timothy Gilmore, whose killers were recorded casing Thal's Piazza apartment in Northern Liberties just before the double homicide.

* The fatal beating of James Koons outside Eastwick's Oasis Gentleman's Club, whose cameras caught the pummeling on tape.

And who knows if a suspect would have been nabbed in the post-Winter Classic brutal brawl at Geno's Steaks if bystanders hadn't recorded the attack on Iraq war vet Neal Auricchio.

"In our experience, the videos we use in court are overwhelmingly from businesses and private citizens," McCann said.

No wonder Mayor Nutter is planning to use Commerce Department money to subsidize the installation of private surveillance cameras. Those systems then would be registered with the Police Department's new SafeCam initiative, which lets police access the recordings for criminal investigations.

Still, SafeCam won't replace the police camera system, he said. "The city is in the midst of hiring a private maintenance contractor to keep everything up and running," he said.

In a year that has begun as violently as 2012 has, that can't happen soon enough.