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Millions wasted on system that leaves Detroit vulnerable to lawsuits.

It is easy to find PR releases extolling the virtues of new products and the wonderful decision making processes which led to their implementation. Not so easy to find are the stories about things that didn’t work and why. Particularly with some numbers provided, as is the case for this article.

This news item is therefore particularly interesting as in-car video has become a standard requirement for the new generation police vehicle.

The Detroit Police Department has spent more than $18.5 million since 2001 on an in-car camera system so ineffective that the top brass this spring told the Justice Department they should “tear it out at the roots in order to start from scratch,” according to internal documents.

The total cost could be higher. But police can’t find all invoices for the mishmash of cameras and computers that are plagued with image and audio problems. They work less than 17 percent of the time, according to confidential reports and internal records obtained by The Detroit News.

Police Chief Warren Evans plans to announce improvements to the system that a federal report in June claimed is so bad “its most common use today is a platform to play solitaire.” Two years ago, the city tried to solve the problem by buying equipment that was already obsolete. In May, police brass suggested fixing the cameras by using Velcro, briefcases and cigarette lighters to jury-rig incompatible hardware to squad cars, according to reports.

“With such low expectations that the system will work, few officers appear to use the technology in their daily patrol activities,” according to a June 1 report commissioned by the U.S. Justice Department. “The current technology cannot be salvaged.”

The reports highlight the city’s struggles to make basic changes required by a 2003 federal consent decree to settle lawsuits about police brutality and jail conditions. The city has spent $13 million on monitoring costs alone and met 39 percent of goals imposed by the Justice Department.

The federal agency required cameras be immediately implemented in all patrol cars to record vehicle stops, consents for searches and use of police dogs. At least 72 percent of the nation’s police agencies have video cameras, according to an International Association of Chiefs of Police report in 2003, the most recent report available.

Detroit’s system is “pointless” and “non-responsive,” leaving the city vulnerable to false accusations about cops and frivolous lawsuits that cost millions of dollars each year, according to the Justice Department report from June obtained by The News through the Freedom of Information Act.

The city spent $15 million trying to solve the problems in May 2008, after investing nearly $1 million in 2001 and another $2.5 million in 2004. As recently as August, Evans called the cameras “junk” that “don’t work.”

“It has been a mess,” Evans told the Board of Police Commissioners.

Saul Green, a mayoral aide who oversees public safety, said he’s confident Evans can salvage much of the equipment. Evans released a statement Monday night saying he’ll announce a “major breakthrough” today for the “long-troubled system,” but his spokesman wouldn’t elaborate on the plans.

“As bad as the history has been, right now I feel where we are today and based on where we were in June, this is a good news story,” Green said. “I am very, very pleased on what we have done in 120 days.”

The Justice Department wrote a step-by-step memo to Detroit officials in June, instructing them on how to solicit contractors that could fix the cameras. The city has yet to act, but Green said proposals will be distributed “very soon.”

Dates, lighting are issues

Video cameras not only protect the public from rogue cops. They protect police — and cities — from false claims of brutality and may even put crooks in jail faster.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police estimates 93 percent of complaints against officers are dismissed after reviewing video evidence. And 94 percent of defendants plead guilty before trial in cases that involve video, according to the group.

But the tool isn’t available in Detroit, which has lost $116 million in settlements and court judgments against the Police Department from 2002 to 2007, the most recent years of data.

“The problem in Detroit is that video evidence is rarely available,” said David Robinson, a former Detroit police officer and attorney who has filed several misconduct lawsuits against the department.

“We ask for the video all the time and we never get it.”

Police Officer John Bennett, a candidate for the City Council, calls cameras an insurance policy. “It protects the officer against accusations that may not be true,” he said. “That’s huge, especially in this day and time when you have people willing to sue the police for any and everything.”

But only 37 of 212 squad cars were able to download usable video in an April 24 test by Lt. Dale A. Greenleaf of the city’s Office of Civil Rights, according to an internal report. Just one of 21 traffic enforcement cars had working cameras, while none did among the nine cars at the city’s Northeast District, according to the reports.

As bad as the findings were, the Department of Justice thought Greenleaf’s study was too optimistic. In a June 1 review, it deemed some of the video from supposedly working cameras too dark or improperly dated.

Vendor installation skipped

The city’s problems with the cameras precede federal oversight of the police.

In 2001, two years before the decree, Detroit paid Mobile Vision of New Jersey $854,080 for roughly 220 cameras. The city hoped to save money on the units that cost about $3,800 apiece by having city workers install them. At the time, the company was charging $100 an hour for installation.

Usually, municipalities pay extra for the installation to avoid problems, said John Powers, a spokesman for the company that has provided more than 65,000 systems in 5,000 departments nationwide.

“Once we delivered the equipment to the city, it was out of our hands,” he said.

The city tried to overhaul the system in May 2008, awarding a $15 million, no-bid contract to install prototypes to 200 cars. The contract, which went to Bob Maxey Ford and Great Lakes Service Center, was criticized by the Justice Department for “multiple failures,” including faulty wiring and bad video. Calls to both companies weren’t returned.

One year after the contract, a consultant for the Justice Department spot-checked eight squad cars. None could upload or record video.

Other problems documented in the reports: Many cameras can download incident footage only through wireless Internet networks, which takes three hours; the city has resisted calls to buy computer systems from one vendor, preferring instead to issue contracts and build the systems piecemeal; when the system does make recordings, the images are time-stamped incorrectly or there is no audio; and one of the prototypes the city is testing was deemed “expensive” and only applicable to military vehicles.

Reproduced from : Detroit News

Tags: IT Systems, New Technology Application, Video Surveillance

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Emergency Vehicles, Policing Services. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.