EVERETT — The city continues to push forward with a plan to bring up to 50 cameras to Everett parks.
Officials are expecting to hear back from the state by the end of April on whether they’ll get money to pay for the ca
meras.
Even if the state won’t help, the parks department plans to find some way to pay for it — even if the cameras have to be added piecemeal over time, said Paul Kaftanski, parks and recreation director.
The reason is that cameras are an effective crime deterrent, he said. With tighter budgets, putting cameras in parks costs far less than hiring more park rangers.
“I want to make sure our park visitors feel comfortable in our system,” Kaftanski said. “It doesn’t do any good to take a complaint after something has happened — that’s hard to make right. I want to avoid that call.”
The city would like to put cameras around parking lots and other areas that are out of sight and most likely to get hit by vandals or thieves, he said.
Officials say they aren’t interested in spying on people in parks. As Kaftanski put it: “Our intent is not to watch you eat fried chicken on your picnic blanket.”
Property crimes are a continual problem. Last year, the city dealt with 242 instances of vandalism across the parks system, according to city work orders. The year before that, it was 285.
Kaftanski estimated that the city spent $7,758 last year on labor costs to fix the damage. Plus, when parks workers are cleaning up graffiti, they aren’t doing something else that needs to get done.
The city already has older surveillance cameras at Forest and Walter E. Hall parks.
Another camera system installed outside rest rooms at Wiggums Hollow Park appears to at least anecdotally to have helped reduce vandalism there. The year before the city turned on the camera, there were 22 incidents of vandalism at the rest rooms. The next two years, 2009 and 2010, there were 15 vandalism incidents each year.
Kaftanski also pointed out that cameras are already used routinely in public places. The city already has more than a dozen surveillance cameras installed around downtown since 1999. They’re also at the Everett Transit station and even on some public buses. Most recently, a videotape on a school bus in Snohomish caught a bus driver yanking a kindergartner to the floor by her backpack.
Snohomish County already is using cameras at Willis Tucker Park, where the parks administration building is located, and at the Evergreen State Fairgrounds.
The county also recently installed cameras at the new skate park at the Martha Lake Airfield Park. It wasn’t the skaters the county was worried about, but ne’er-do-wells coming after hours, county parks and recreation director Tom Teigen said.
The city uses both flash cameras, which take a succession of high-resolution photos when they are triggered by motion detectors, and livestream cameras that capture images all the time. Some of the cameras also issue verbal warnings when triggered.
The flash cameras have led to some calls from chagrined dog owners whose pooches have set off the cameras on late night walks. The cameras have also led to at least a handful of prosecutions. In one instance, a thief drove into the fairgrounds, tied an ATM machine to his truck and ripped it off its base. Authorities were able to review footage and get a license plate number, Teigen said.
While a camera can’t ever replace a ranger, Teigen said there’s evidence that cameras work. However, much of that evidence is anecdotal, he said.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington continues to oppose video surveillance in city parks. In 2008 the organization wrote an opposition paper on the matter when the city of Seattle was considering more cameras for its parks.
In that paper, Jennifer Shaw, the legislative director of ACLU of Washington, said the organization was opposed because people living in a free society should have a reasonable expectation they won’t be tracked in public spaces.
Video cameras record everything — legal or not, she wrote. And research has shown that “video surveillance does not stop or deter crime and is a waste of resources that could be spent on more effective alternatives.”
Kaftanski said the city hasn’t nailed down the details of what types of cameras the city would buy. The city is asking the state for $300,000 to buy the cameras and the city might chip in as much as $60,000 more.
A project summary identified the following parks as likely locations for cameras: Legion, Sen. Henry M. Jackson, Clark, Forest, Howarth, Lions, the Interurban Trail and Thornton A. Sullivan.
Reporter Debra Smith: 425-339-3197 or dsmith@heraldnet.com
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