500-Camera Police Plan Advances

The idea of investing in 500 new surveillance cameras around town to fight crime and solve more homicides came one step closer to reality Monday night.

That was the outcome of Monday night’s Board of Alders Finance Committee meeting. The three-hour virtual meeting took place online via Zoom and YouTube Live.

The committee alders voted unanimously in support of the Elicker Administration’s proposal to spend $12 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) aid on a suite of public safety and information technology projects, including 500 new surveillance cameras citywide. The vote came after police and community leaders pitched the tech upgrade as an effective tool for deterring crime, solving homicides, and breaking the ​“no snitching” code of silence.

The plan needs one more approval, in a vote by the full Board of Alders. Some Finance Committee alders Monday also suggested that the proposal be vetted by the Public Safety Committee before it gets a final vote.

The $12 million in proposed spending would include expanding ShotSpotter to the far east and west sides of town, paying bonuses to lateral police hires, building out a backup police data center on Wintergreen Avenue, boosting overtime for walking beats and bicycle patrols, and overhauling the police department’s atavistic computer-aided dispatch and record management system (CAD/RMS). Click here for a previous article breaking down how that money would be spent.

At the center of this latest tranche of proposed ARPA spending is $3.8 million for buying and installing 500 new video-surveillance cameras.

Those would include 333 fixed location cameras, 165 fixed location license plate recognition (LPR) cameras, and two mobile LPR cameras, all to be placed in crime hotspots across the city.

“To be able to have a starting point with our own cameras and our own intel center just helps us to be able to better respond” to everything from shootings to car crashes, Interim Police Chief Renee Dominguez told the committee alders Monday.

She said that New Haven’s police department currently has access to only 190 publicly owned cameras citywide. That’s significantly less than the 1,200 cameras available to the Hartford Police Department, and the 1,600 cameras available to the Bridgeport Police Department.

Assistant Chief Karl Jacobson said that Hartford’s homicide closure rate is at around 70 percent.

New Haven’s is around 30 percent, according to Dominguez. (The number is fluid, she noted; sometimes cases, like this one, are solved in a subsequent year.)

Jacobson also said that studies of police surveillance camera usage in Baltimore and Chicago have shown both a reduction in crime and a saving of public money that would otherwise be spent on responding to homicides and shootings.

“We do a lot of things right” in New Haven, he said. ​“But we need to do more and do better to reduce our numbers” around gun violence.

Ultimately, all of the committee alders on Monday agreed — and unanimously backed the full spending package, including the plan for 500 new cameras.

“I think that it’s up to us to strike a balance between civil liberties and technology like cameras, which can potentially be a deterrent to crime,” East Rock Alder Charles Decker said before voting in support.

He said he came into Monday’s hearing skeptical of the camera proposal — but was swayed by the impassioned public testimony in support of the idea given Monday night by Ice the Beef President Chaz Carmon, Newhallville Community Management Team Chair Kim Harris, Project Longevity Program Manager Stacy Spell, Varick Memorial AME Zion Church Pastor Kelcy Steele, and city Youth and Recreation Department Youth Services Specialist Ronald Huggins.

“The folks that we heard from are real community leaders that are out there dealing with the effects of violence every day,” Decker said. ​“So their word carries the day with me.” (See more below on those community leaders’ public testimony Monday night.)

City Budget Director and Acting Controller Michael Gormany said on Monday that the $12 million included in this latest ARPA spending pitch will be pulled from a largely unspent $20 million bucket that alders previously approved for patching Covid-related hits to the city budget.

Overall, the city has received $115 million in ARPA aid. Gormany said the city has spent only $4.3 million of those funds so far.

Police: Surveillance & Civil Liberties ​“Can Coexist”

Dominguez and Jacobson framed their police-camera pitch to alders on Monday around three key arguments: that more cameras can aid in police investigations, deter crime, and — if rolled out with proper care and focus — not infringe on individuals’ privacy.

“Physical public surveillance and civil liberties can coexist,” Jacobson said.

How exactly would these cameras be used by the police department? Westville Alder and Finance Committee Vice-Chair Adam Marchand asked. And how would they be useful to the NHPD?

Dominguez said that having video footage at the police officers’ fingertips — in the form of Milestone video surveillance feeds sent directly from city cameras to the police department’s intel center — would mean that police would not have to spend as much time knocking on neighbors’ doors and parsing through private business surveillance footage for clues as to what took place after a crime.

She referred again to how Bridgeport’s ​“solvability far exceeds ours for shootings and homicides. A big piece is cameras. If you have 1,600 cameras to pull from vs. 190, that’s a big, huge difference.”

Will these cameras use facial recognition technology, or some other form of artificial intelligence? asked East Rock Alder Anna Festa.

No, Dominguez replied. ​“There is none of that on these cameras or license plate readers.” All they can read are ​“letters on the actual license plate. Nothing to do with facial recognition.”

Will the city be able to move these cameras around? Festa asked.

Not really, Dominguez and Deputy Chief Administrative Officer Becky Bombero replied. ​“We own the assets. To that extent, we could reprioritize location,” Bombero said. ​“But they are dependent on the infrastructure that supports them. … These will be hardwired into the system, point to point, so they’ll be location specific.” Thus the importance of using current crime data to inform where to place the cameras across the city.

Is there evidence that a much higher number of cameras in Bridgeport and Hartford has actually deterred crime? Decker asked.

“It’s difficult to say what crime doesn’t happen” and why, Dominguez said. But, when people know that there are cameras in certain areas and know that they are being watched by the police, that tends to ​“curb behavior.”

Jacobson said that surveillance cameras also ​“disrupt the ​‘stop snitching’ code.” That’s because cameras show not only who may have been involved in a crime, but also witnesses. ​“You’re gonna have camera footage of who was there,” he said. So, if police approach someone they know was a witness, ​“it’s not like you’re snitching. There’s video of them being there, there’s video of them witnessing a homicide.”

That video evidence may make it easier for witnesses to talk with the police.

Public: ​“Let The Cameras Do The Talking”

The five people who spoke up during Monday night’s public hearing section of the Finance Committee meeting all threw their unequivocal support behind the 500-camera plan.

Carmon leads the youth anti-violence organization Ice the Beef. He said that the city needs to do anything and everything it can to quell the rise in gun violence, ​“bring some of these people to justice that are causing these acts,” and help provide ​“a sense of closure for some of these families” who have lost loved ones to violent crime.

Carmon also supported the notion that cameras will help break the ​“no snitching” roadblock encountered by most police investigations into gun violence.

“People are scared to say something. People don’t want to get killed themselves,” he said. ​“If we had more cameras, updated cameras, we could possibly get more information on these shootings.”

He also affirmed that ​“cameras do deter crime. I’ve been a criminal, and you’re not going to go and do a crime where you know cameras are. You’re just not.”

“Our city would be safer if we do this,” he said.

Steele agreed. He said that police regularly stop by his Dixwell Avenue church asking to take a look at his surveillance video footage of nearby shootings. He said his church’s cameras were bought at Walmart, and rarely offer footage that is focused or high enough quality to help with an investigation.

“We are tired of children dying. We are tired of senseless gun violence. We are tired of our communities being left on the other side of the digital divide,” he said. ​“In a society where people are more afraid of being a snitch” than of unchecked gun violence, he said, ​“I say: Let the cameras do the talking.”

Harris, who lives in Newhallville and runs a pre-school on Goodrich Street, said that ​“crime has soared in my community. … We are living in a time when we are just experiencing things we’ve never experienced in my lifetime.”

If cameras might help deter new crimes and close the books on unsolved shootings, she said, then they’re worth installing.

“We should be mindful that it’s better to have cameras when we don’t need them than to need them when we don’t have them,” she said.

Huggins, a staffer in the city’s youth services department, said that crime is about desire and opportunity. While cameras can’t change anything about the former impulse, he said, they can help ​“limit opportunities individuals have to commit those crimes.”

And Spell, a retired city detective who now leads the local violence-interruption program Project Longevity, said that the data collection is key for modern-day law enforcement. More cameras will only help bolster the quality data the city is able to collect on when and where crimes take place.

“We are living in a time when we need to enhance the tools on law enforcement’s toolbelt,” he said.

Alders Marchand, Festa and Decker all cited the public testimony when explaining their support for the $12 million ARPA spending proposal, including the 500 new cameras.

“We heard from the public. The testifiers were very clear about [the importance of the] prevention of violence” and how these initiatives, including the cameras, might help, Festa said.

“People want and need to be safe and feel safe,” Marchand said. While $12 million is a large chunk of the $115 million that the city is receiving in federal pandemic-relief aid, ​“I think it’s appropriate given what we’ve heard from our residents about what we need to be safe.”

See below for a full breakdown of how the city proposes to spend this tranche of $12 million.