Philly surveillance cameras: Controller says 32% work, Nutter says 85%

There seems to be some widespread disagreement about how many city surveillance cameras actually work.

• Less than a third of the city’s 202 surveillance cameras work properly, according to a report from City Controller Alan Butkovitz. 
• The report was a follow-up to one that Butkovitz released last summer that said that less than half the city’s surveillance cameras worked properly.
• That figure doesn’t include the hundreds of SEPTA-owned cameras that city cops also have access to, but still represents a gap in utility.
• The Nutter administration said the Controller’s report was wrong and that 85 percent of the city’s cameras work.

The Controller’s Office said that out of the 31 cameras it randomly sampled, only 32 percent worked. The rest of the cameras either didn’t work or had problems that distorted the images, like “water spots inside the camera dome” and “film and dirt on the camera’s exterior.” Read the report here [pdf].

It’s important to note that the city’s 202 cameras make up just over 10 percent of the video feeds that the Philadelphia Police Department have access to. Ninety percent of the nearly 1,800 cameras the PPD monitors are SEPTA cameras.

In his report, Butkovitz championed Baltimore’s video surveillance program, noting that it has “97 percent of its cameras functioning at all times” and that “Baltimore has 7.5 times more cameras per person than Philadelphia, even though it has almost 900,000 less citizens.”

But not everyone believes the city should be in the business of owning its own cameras. It’s more cost effective for the city to tap into video feeds owned by other organizations, like SEPTA and the University of Pennsylvania, said Mike Vidro, the staffer from the Office of Innovation and Technology who oversees the PPD’s video surveillance program.

“If it was up to me, the city wouldn’t own any cameras,” Vidro said in an interview with Technically Philly last February.