Thursday, November 20, 2008
"There's little to show for the $7 million taxpayers have plunged down this rabbit hole."
Below are some facts from yesterday's
T-P article titled "Blind Justice", which dealt with the city's high-priced contracts for ineffective crime cameras.
Five years ago, Nagin promised more than 1,000 cameras across the city. The city contracts and their operations have been cloaked in secrecy, causing a rift between the administration and some City Council members.
Then in late September, Harrison Boyd, the city's new technology officer, announced that a company with close ties to that office had been paid nearly $3 million this year to maintain and improve the cameras, a price tag substantially higher than the cameras' purchase price.
Last week, the impact of the cameras again came under scrutiny. This time it was in a council budget hearing. Councilwoman Stacy Head said the city has spent $7,500 per camera this year for maintenance and upgrades to each of the 240 cameras, while it costs only $6,240 to buy and install a new camera. The $1.6 million proposed for maintenance and restoration in 2009 is more than it would cost to buy all new cameras.
Then, for emphasis, this
T-P editorial from today:
The concept of installing crime cameras would seem to make sense in a city with high crime and reluctant witnesses.
But it's been five years since Mayor Nagin promised more than 1,000 working cameras and only 240 have been installed. Most of them are now inoperable, high-tech telephone pole decorations -- like the broken camera at St. Roch Avenue and North Villere Street, near where Mr. [Kendrick] Thomas was killed Monday night.
...
There's little to show for the $7 million taxpayers have plunged down this rabbit hole. That's more than the $5.5 million budgeted for recruiting and training new police officers next year. Yet the administration wants the council to approve another $1.6 million for camera maintenance in 2009. Spending more on cameras would only make sense if our city had a fully-staffed Police Department, an efficient justice system, someone who made the cameras work and truckloads of extra cash. None of these apply to New Orleans.
[This camera fiasco is so ridiculously ineffective and overpriced, sometimes I wonder if this whole thing is really just the biggest
"Punk'd" prank ever. Ashton Kutcher is going to run out from behind the curtain during Mayor Nagin's next State of the City address, and tell everyone that the
real cameras were hidden throughout the city, filming the people who were getting mad about the fake cameras... so it's all a big joke, and everyone would have to gather in tight for a group shot and tell the tv audience "New Orleans got punk'd".]
Bayou St. John David is correct to say that "the technology office isn't the only weak link" in Nagin's administration. The trash contracts are bad, too. However there is a political opportunity with the cameras that doesn't exist with the trash contracts (yet). At intersections throughout the city, we have ineffective and inoperable crime cameras coupled with incredibly efficient red light traffic ticket cameras. This is an unbeatable political contrast, in my view. I've harped on this
before, and I'm sure I'll do it again. An aspiring political candidate should emphasize the absurdity of the camera issue, because it brings fear and outrage together in a potent, emotional way-- you can connect a widespread annoyance (red light cameras) with a security issue (ineffective crime cameras), then add a whiff of corruption to get the media slobbering... and you can run with that! That's a combination that can appeal across all voting demographics. It has something for everyone.
Labels: crime, Cronies, Elections and Campaigns
7 Comments:
Those effin' red light cameras ... geez, they even check on your speed, and if you're speeding, you're hit with the picture and the fine in the mail a few weeks later!
I just don't understand how they can rig that up, and have serious problems with the video cameras. I'd love to see who got the contracts, and any correspondence between the City and the contractor on that.
Here's a story on crime cameras in Chicago. Leaving aside the merits of the program, it looks like Chicago spent far less to purchase and operate their 560 cameras than NOLA. And the Chicago cameras are actually monitored 24/7 with feeds into station houses and cars on patrol.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/24/MNACSA80Q.DTL
Note: I make a distinction between the traffic cameras and "crime cameras". Traffic cameras are a ridiculous money making scheme that arguably makes traffic safety worse.
General surveillance cameras or crime cameras serve a different purpose and there are different considerations to balance.
You could turn a number of these issues into big time political winners. That's the most frustrating thing about the political discourse here. You could build a pretty solid coalition simply by doing the right thing on any number of the things we talk about on a daily basis.
A number of chickens are coming home to roost during this budget process. We shouldn't let anything slide.
Am I the only person who has a little more faith in the reliability of a traffic camera than a traffic cop? Anyway, car accidents are the leading cause of death for people under 45, but nobody ever drives badly enough to deserve a ticket. When I moved back Uptown after a couple of years in the French Quarter in the mid-nineties, I was surprised at how widespread speeding in residential areas had become -- I had a girlfriend with a daughter young enough for a stroller at the time, so it might have made me more aware of the geniuses who are smart enough to make time doing 40 on streets like Camp or Chestnut. I'd like to see the city vary the orientation of stop signs (at the intersection of two side streets, they almost all face the street that runs river/lake), and I'd almost like to see it put the traffic cameras on side streets. Of course, that wouldn't be a big revenue generator.
When I first wrote that about the sanitation department and technology department, the crime camera problems were only just starting to become apparent, and my frustration level was reaching a boiling point. I don't want to give myself undue credit, but I believe I was pretty much alone in calling the mayor a crook in the Spring of 2006. I didn't hear anybody else say that the mayor couldn't pass the smell test he suggested for Landrieu or that the pattern of secrecy, contradictory answers or answers that didn't match the facts, and fat contracts to campaign donors and cronies would lead to questions about the integrity of any other politician. At least one blogger wrote that it wasn't even worth responding to anybody deluded enough to call the mayor a crook. By the time I wrote that about the two departments, in Spring 2007, the corruption of the Nagin admin was such an article of faith among local bloggers, that most didn't seem to realize that most of the city refused to view the mayor that way. So when everybody was getting exited about complicated, hard to prove matters like Yachtgate, I was saying that it might be better to start by pointing out the obvious stuff that's in the public record.
I'd still say that it's important to keep reminding people of the administration-wide pattern of waste, cronyism, secrecy and lies.
I think you're more likely to be murdered in Orleans Parish than to be killed in a car accident.
If I read the records correctly in 2007 there were about 200 traffic deaths in non rural areas of Louisiana. I don't think they all occurred in Orleans Parish.
I found it.
There were 35 traffic fatalities in Orleans Parish in 2007. There were 987 in whole state.
