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Criminals beware: You’re being watched.
The city of Mount Vernon has added to its collection of surveillance cameras after Wal-Mart recently donated $5,000 to purchase the additional equipment to help law enforcement downtown.
“It’s grown — we started out with just a few cameras, then added to that each year,” Mount Vernon Police Chief Ken Bergsma said. “Some of those funds have helped make this happen.”
Primarily using an assortment of grants and donations, the city has been able to bolster its camera collection the past three years to help make downtown safer, Bergsma said. Thirty-two cameras are in operation to deter crime in public areas — 16 of which are located within the city’s parks and trails system.
The cameras are not closed circuit — officers can monitor suspicious activity live or let the cameras record incidences throughout the city. Depending on the camera, officers can adjust the pan, tilt or zoom of individual cameras.
A digital video recorder (DVR) records activity on the cameras, which are triggered by movement, said Kim Kleppe, information systems manager for the city of Mount Vernon. Video feeds can be rewound by officers via their laptop or at the police station through a workstation.
Officers can monitor recordings and live feeds from more than a dozen cameras at a time since all cameras DVRs are on the same network, Kleppe said. Each DVR can store up to a couple of months worth of video.
The city started with 10 cameras in 2005, and have slowly built up a supply over the past three years.
“It’s very slow,” Kleppe said. “We don’t have a lot of money, so we do it bits at a time.”
The cost for surveillance cameras ranges from $400 to $2,000, depending on the features, Kleppe said.
Camera locations are decided by Kleppe and either the police department or the parks and recreation department.
“I do it more from the technical side, they do it from the practical side,” he said.
So far, the cameras have helped supply evidence in a couple of cases, Bergsma said, including an accident at an intersection.
“It gives you an opportunity to look in real time and see what’s going on,” Bergsma said. “We try to place them in areas where it’s going to give the greatest opportunity to observe activity.”
Mayor Bud Norris has been a staunch supporter of the surveillance cameras since he took office in 2004. He said with the cameras, the city is trying to curtail vandalism and promote safety throughout the city’s parks and downtown area.
“That’s a major problem here and throughout the country,” Norris said. “I think they’re extremely valuable. People conduct themselves differently when there’s a camera around.”
