Romeoville To Invest $200,000 In Public Security Cameras In 2020

ROMEOVILLE, IL — While discussing the new year's budget at the March 4 village board meeting, Romeoville Village Trustee Jose Chavez brought up the issue of public security cameras. The resulting discussion ended in a statement by village board members, that they planned to invest about $200,000 in security cameras for village parks this year.

"We're going to have a lot more cameras... for safety," Chavez said.

"They're not red light cameras, they're security cameras," Mayor John Noak said.

The cameras are part of the board's stated efforts to improve public safety and reduce crime incidence throughout the village. In particular, village board members stated a desire to locate and prevent graffiti. prevent Currently, 255 security cameras are installed in parks and public facilities throughout Romeoville. Since 2017, most crime rates in the village have fallen slightly.

However, it is not clear if there is a causative link between public safety and security cameras. Studies conducted in both the U.S. and the U.K. since the early 'aughts have shown that while security cameras may help deter property crimes, they rarely have any effect on violent or personal crimes. It is also possible that rather than reducing crime, security cameras merely move crime away from the cameras.

Additionally, some privacy and civil rights advocates claim that security cameras aid in discriminatory practices by police and curtail citizens' right to privacy.

"You'll hear this from people... they'll say, 'well you know there's not a right to privacy when you're out in public,'" said Ed Yohnka, a privacy rights advocate with the Illinois ACLU. "OK, great. But the problem is that someone out in public with their naked eye can't peer into your car."

In response to these criticisms, Romeoville Village Manager Steve Gulden said that the cameras' first and only purpose was to improve public safety.

"Our job is to keep our residents safe and these cameras do that," Gulden said.

But Yohnka said that arguments regarding public safety are often a slippery slope. Using cities like Chicago and London that have already adopted widespread security camera systems as an example, Yohnka said that the surveillance industry, like many industries, has a tendency to grow out of control once established.

"The overarching concern is that you put in place a surveillance network that only grows," he said. "As we've seen here in the city of Chicago, once you start this investment, the system only grows, it doesn't ever reduce or shrink... once you have the hardware in place, software technology only expands and becomes more invasive."

Chicago especially, he said, has caved to the twin pressures of both law enforcement desire for cameras and profit-minded technology companies.

"One of the things that sort of popped up in the city of Chicago recently... is that the city has all kinds of contracts now with companies that provide facial recognition software," Yohnka said. "So you go from the hardware of a camera system... to, the next iteration is the cameras become more sophisticated in tilt and zoom in a way that... can peer into your car."

Without mentioning any of the specific technical capabilities, Mayor Noak praised the apparent sophistication of the existing camera systems at the village board meeting.

"I've got to tell you, some of the technology we've invested in was pretty productive in grabbing some graffiti last year," Noak said.

Gulden also noted the variety of cameras the village uses, all with their own technological niche.

"There's infrared cameras, there's color cameras, there's... all kinds motion detector cameras, there's all kinds of different cameras that are out there," Gulden said.

The 255 cameras the village operates are spread across a number of public areas: 98 at Village Hall, 35 at the Rec Center, five at the Animal Control facility, 20 at Public Works, 37 between the village's three fire stations, 29 at the Athletics & Event Center, and 31 scattered across the village's parks. The $200,000 investment plan calls for 37 additional cameras to be installed over the course of 2020: five new cameras at Village Hall, six at the Rec Center, 19 at the Public Works facility, seven more at Deer Crossing Park, and a yet-to-be-determined number of new cameras at the fire stations, Conservation Park, Wesglen and Boucher. All the village's cameras are purchased from only two companies, Total Automation Concepts based out of Alsip, and Tri-Electronics, Inc. based in Hammond, Indiana.

Gulden said the exact cost of installing and operating an individual camera varies depending on location and other factors.

"It all depends on where they're going, because you have to run the cable, you have to run the line of site stuff to go back to our servers... it is very costly to get the information from the camera stored, and back to to the appropriate servers and sites" he said. "And the electric... sometimes we have to get a pole up, sometimes we have to add it to a light fixture that's out there already."

Yohnka warned that as more cameras are installed, the pressure from both the companies that install them and the law enforcement agencies that use them will only grow.

"Once you adapt the use of the technology, there's a natural tendency to believe that the technology is going to hold all the answers," he said. "And that is the kind of thing that creates... this kind of surveillance."