The budget for Cayman’s electronic monitoring centre has doubled in the upcoming 2011/12 government spending plan – mostly due to new costs of maintaining and ensuring the country’s new public closed circuit television monitoring system.
The costs are separate from an estimated $800,000 being spent to purchase additional cameras for the system, which is eventually expected to cover all of Grand Cayman and Cayman Brac.
According to documents obtained by the Caymanian Compass, a CCTV infrastructure lease for the use of Caribbean Utilities power poles and “dark fibre” to electronically transmit CCTV images from cameras to storage will cost $100,000 per year.
The arrangement took some legal manoeuvring.
The government can transmit that data on its own wireless or hard-wired network in George Town, but in other areas of Grand Cayman it needs the assistance of CUC’s infrastructure.
To obtain that, CUC had to apply for a telecommunications licence with the government-appointed regulator, the Information and Communications Technology Authority, and it must pay 6 per cent of its yearly earnings from the CCTV data transmissions to the authority in licensing fees.
Mr. Bush said an agreement was reached to form a subsidiary – Data Link Ltd. – brought into existence solely to transmit images from the public CCTV system. Lawmakers approved changes this year to allow for the new arrangement.
A CCTV system maintenance contract has also been awarded to The Security Centre Company and will cost an estimated $100,000 per year over the next five years, according to budget documents. An additional $25,000 per year will be paid for cameras, signs, monitors and any items that sustain damage not covered under the maintenance or warranty for the devices.
Insurance and warranties for the system will cost approximately $80,000 per year.
It is ultimately the contracted company’s responsibility to make sure the various CCTV cameras are performing as expected, according to Portfolio of Internal and External Affairs Deputy Chief Officer Eric Bush.
“As you can imagine…with the seasons that we have, the cameras are only as good as how clean the lens is,” Mr. Bush said in an interview earlier this year.
“Whilst they will be weather-proof, [a camera] still has to have visible glass; salt spray for example, these are all things that we took into account.
“There are provisions in there for simple things like cleaning the lens,” he said.
“The [911 assistant director] would be responsible for creating a schedule or a regimen, which would ensure that all of these minor things are taken care of, but also that they are monitored to ensure we don’t have a situation, unfortunately like at the dump, where three of their nine cameras were not working.”
When George Town landfill worker Anna Evans went missing on 27 January, it was discovered that three of the nine CCTV cameras at the landfill had not been working at the time she disappeared.
They have since been repaired.
Once the entire public CCTV system is up and running, it is expected there will be 346 cameras at more than 100 locations around the two Islands.
More electronic monitors
The government is also anticipating an increase in the use of electronic monitoring devices on prisoners following the implementation of certain sections of Cayman’s Alternative Sentencing Law earlier this year.
The increase will cost about $206,000 in the upcoming 2011/12 budget as the number of “active” electronic monitoring devices maintained in Cayman will go from approximately 12 to about 30.
Electronic monitors can be used on prisoners who receive police or court bail prior to their sentencing. The devices can also be used as part of a sentence for a crime, which allows the prisoners to be monitored from home or another specific location.
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yup… a police is in the making! watch out, Cayman! This is going to cost us and dont surprise crime remains the same!