Latest update January 11th, 2025 4:10 AM
May 30, 2014 News
The Guyana Police Force will by Monday have immediate access to footage recorded on closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras that have been erected around the city to catch criminals in the act.
A senior police official told Kaieteur News yesterday that technicians are expected to complete installing at least six CCTV monitors at the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) Headquarters, Eve Leary, by next Monday.
The monitors, to be manned by police ranks, will be linked to the CCTV camera ‘feed’ at the National Intelligence Centre, located in the Castellani House compound.
This development comes four months after Minister of Home Affairs Clement Rohee revealed that the Defence Board had approved the establishment of ‘a direct feed’ from the CCTV system to Eve Leary.
Rohee had stated that his Ministry had ‘constantly supported’ the view that CCTV cameras in the City be used on a real time basis to detect and fight crime,
At present, the footage is monitored and archived by staff at the National Intelligence Centre, and police have to contact staff there to access this footage.
The Central Intelligence Centre is manned mainly by the Office of the President, with some staffing coming from the Police and Army, whose officers were seconded to help run the agency.
Government had stated in 2005 that it was introducing the CCTV cameras to help counter rampant crime. Some $11M was allocated in the 2011 national budget to purchase equipment for this purpose.
But in July, 2013, then Crime Chief, Seelall Persaud, revealed that the police did not have access to footage from the cameras, and could only access the feed from the cameras upon request.
Responding to the Crime Chief, Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr. Roger Luncheon, said that the cameras were not set up so that the Police can see what is happening in real time and respond to crimes as they happen. He had also stated that intelligence gathering was not the province of the police.
The Crime Chief’s revelation had prompted APNU Parliamentarian and former Police Commissioner Winston Felix to suggest that police at all stations should have access to the footage from the cameras.
Felix had also questioned the effectiveness of the cameras, while pointing out that the cameras were apparently failing to record the many robberies that were being committed around the city.
Others have raised similar concerns, given the fact that there have been several brazen crimes, including execution-style killings, and very few arrests.
But the Force’s Information Technology Specialist Senior Superintendant of Police, Edgar Thomas, had told Kaieteur News that the cameras are producing “very good” images.
He also revealed that the Force has acquired the most powerful and widely used Video Enhanced software (Ocean Systems dTective), at a cost of over $7M, which will enable investigators to enhance CCTV images.
Often, images police collect from privately-owned CCTV cameras are barely recognizable. This was reportedly the case recently when blurred security camera images prevented police from recognizing two bandits who robbed a female bakery employee.
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