Norfolk near launch of street surveillance camera system

NORFOLK

No one has to sell Robert Hendricks Jr. on the street surveillance camera the city is testing across from the Olde Huntersville store his parents have operated for 30 years.

Signs warning against loitering and wearing hoods inside signal past problems.

"If you ask me," Hendricks said Friday from behind the meat counter at Thomas Market, "they should have been up there 10 years ago."

"What took them so long?" a woman in line wanted to know. Another nodded in agreement.

It was a number of things, city officials say. But now they're up and running, with police giving the system a 45-day test ride before officially implementing it June 1.

That would be almost two years after the city in 2007 authorized nine surveillance cameras - the city's first - as part of Project Focus, an anti-crime and anti-blight program targeting three neighborhoods: Huntersville near downtown, East Ocean View and Denby Park near Wards Corner.

Bidding and other issues delayed purchase and installation until December, when the first cameras were placed on utility poles along Pleasant Avenue in East Ocean View. City officials said then that they'd be operating within weeks.

But when testing began, police weren't happy with the controls, the clarity of the images, or the compatibility of the hardware and software, said Capt. Wayne McBride, who's overseeing testing in the Police Operations Center on Virginia Beach Boulevard.

Even city officials were concerned that operators of the $300,000 system couldn't read license plates. So they told the vendor to replace the system.

"We could've lived with what's there," McBride said. " You couldn't ask for anything better than what's up there now."

The test monitor at the Police Operations Center shows nine slowly panning images from the three neighborhoods, in color and clear enough to see license plates - and faces.

Using a computer mouse, Officer Chris Beason showed how he could switch to just the three cameras from one neighborhood, or fill the monitor with a single frame. He aimed the camera and zoomed in to read a street sign a block away. The system also works at night - in black and white and not as clearly.

To show how faces could be identified, Beason zoomed in on a man outside Thomas Market in Huntersville. The man walked a short distance and paused over a patch of grass next to the sidewalk, his back to the camera. McBride chuckled, realizing what was coming.

The man urinated on the grass.

After adjusting himself, he turned around, his salt-and-pepper beard and Jacksonville Jaguars ball cap clearly visible. McBride said if the system had been operational, a monitor would've dispatched a patrol car to check him out for possible public intoxication, because Project Focus strives for zero tolerance.

"You don't see that in every neighborhood," McBride said. "We're trying to lift the bar."

But McBride noticed something else - only one or two people at the front of the store in midafternoon, when he was used to seeing more. Hendricks of the Thomas Market also said he has noticed fewer loiterers: there were none at noon on Friday, despite pleasant temperatures.

The white-hooded cameras are clearly visible on their poles and are meant to be.

"Probably what you get is some displacement," McBride said.

"It's definitely not a covert system," added Lt. Franklin Allgood Jr., who is in charge of the Technology Support Unit doing the testing.

The system will be able to be monitored from each of the three police patrol divisions, although Chief Bruce P. Marquis hasn't said yet whether someone would be assigned to constantly watch the screens, McBride said.

The chief also said through a department spokesman that he wants to wait about six months to see how effective the cameras are before recommending that more be placed.

The city already is shopping for more cameras, visible and hidden, for the 14 parking garages it operates, announced after the March 22 shooting death of a 26-year-old man in the Waterside Festival Marketplace parking garage. It hopes to award a contract by July 1, said Stanley Stein, assistant city manager.

"Having a camera system is just like having another officer out there," Beason said.

Not everyone sees it that way.

Merle Rutledge Jr., a city resident, sued Norfolk last month, asking the U.S. District Court to stop camera installation citywide and pay $10 million to affected residents.

He complained that such electronic surveillance by police was unconstitutional: it invades people's privacy, equals an illegal search, and unfairly targets minority neighborhoods, he wrote in his self-filed action.

The court dismissed it last week, according to online records.

In Huntersville, a sign warning of 24-hour video surveillance hangs askew from the side of Thomas Market. It's not new. The store had its own security camera until about two years ago.

Someone stole it.

"That's why," Hendricks said, "I say they should have had those cameras up."

Matthew Bowers, (757) 222-3893, matthew.bowers@pilotonline.com