Brian Rudman: Police turn a blind eye to city's surveillance cameras

Two weeks ago, a new $875,000 high-tech Big Brother surveillance system began spying on the Auckland central business district.

With 49 zoom-lens digital cameras and all the add-ons, and connected to a fibre optic network, it is designed, in the words of the police, "for surveillance, crime prevention and to enhance the public's feelings of safety and well being".

Tell that to the Queen St apartment dwellers who had to flee their fire-threatened homes on Tuesday night. Or to the unfortunate woman who went up in flames in Aotea Square.

So what went wrong? It's simple. The police don't monitor the cameras on Tuesdays. Or Mondays or Wednesdays for that matter. And only on certain hours of the other days of the week.

It's a matter of staffing. But when you add together the time and wages of the 40 detectives and fire safety officers now sifting through the ashes of the 14 fires that night, plus the cost to life and property, you have to wonder at the police's short-sighted arithmetic.

Auckland City ratepayers, who have paid the lion's share of the cost of the hardware, might also wonder whether it's been money well spent. What, after all, is the use of a 21st century fence at the top of the cliff, if the police leave the gate unlocked and use the sentry cameras simply for recording pictures to be looked at later.

The first fire on Tuesday night was at 8.54pm in a car at the corner of Mayoral Drive and Grey's Ave. The firebug then seemed to wander about the inner city setting fire to things. Finally, four and a half hours later, a woman was engulfed in flames in Aotea Square.

It's impossible to believe that a trained observer, using this well-designed, state-of-the-art surveillance system, would not have picked up something out of the ordinary unfolding on the city streets that otherwise quiet night, and sent a patrol car to investigate.

I've been a critic of these spy systems in the past, particularly of ratepayers forking out money for equipment which should come from central Government coffers.

But if we're going to have such a system, it should be used properly.

It's not as though this is the first time this sort of thing has happened.

Over the summer of 2000-2001, there were two beatings, one leading to a death, and a rape within the downtown camera surveillance area.

No monitoring was being done at the time.

Reading a recent Auckland City Council report, it seems this was not just a matter of staffing. The old copper wire-based system was so bad at transmitting video pictures that a "high proportion of the time the police cannot view video images in their control room because of the substandard copper cable network".

At that time, police refusal to staff the system led to the retailers' organisation Heart of the City paying to staff the equipment itself.

There are no such technical drawbacks with the new system, which is a combination of existing city council traffic control cameras and fibre optic network, and new police cameras.

These cameras are so efficient that to satisfy privacy concerns, they have to be programmed not to peer into hotel and apartment windows as they look up and down inner city streets.

Money for them has come from the police, Auckland City, Heart of the City and the Karangahape Rd Business Association.

The impasse now is over paying for the monitoring costs.

Auckland City has recommended an annual cost for the monitoring operation of about $390,000, based on three operators being on duty at peak times and two for the rest of the day, 24 hours a day. The city wants the police to pay this bill.

My understanding is that the police have come back with a figure less than one-third of this amount.

It makes you wonder how serious they are about making the city safe.

Every Government organisation is strapped for cash. But if we are to believe the police propaganda, surveillance cameras stop crime.

They can do that only if someone is monitoring the cameras and calling out the troops when they spot trouble brewing.

Auckland ratepayers have invested heavily in this new system. We were promised a safer city in return.

We have delivered our side of the bargain. Tuesday night did little to encourage me that the police are prepared to honour their part of the deal.