HONOLULU — Mayor Rick Blangiardi’s office said last week that the city’s effort to install new security camera system upgrades in Chinatown has reached its halfway point.
The Mayor’s Office says the city completed installation of 30 new high-resolution security cameras in the Chinatown area as part of sweeping overhaul of a decades-old security camera network in a part of town long prone to crime.
Previously, the city announced that 52 new cameras would be installed.
However, the Mayor’s Office said in a news release that “further discussion and collaboration between the city’s Department of Information Technology and the Honolulu Police Department has resulted in eight additional cameras being added to the project, raising the total number of new cameras set to be installed to 60.”
“The project is expected to be completed by the end of the calendar year,” Ian Scheuring, the mayor’s deputy communications director, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser via email.
He added that “the 30 cameras that are installed are all functioning.”
“But (DIT) is still working on a handful of them — four or five, at last check — that have been experiencing some signal issues, (with the) signal or power going in and out,” he said.
“They are still working on the reliability/connectivity of those cameras,” he said. “DIT had to rebuild all of the connectivity infrastructure for those cameras from the ground up, so they are still working out some of the kinks.”
In addition to the high-resolution quality and 360-degree view plane, the cameras are capable of tracking motion and movement.
They are also equipped with multicolored LED strobe lights and sirens, enhancing their ability to deter and prevent criminal activity, the city said.
Footage from each camera is stored for 30 days, in accordance with the law.
The stored footage gives police an opportunity to investigate and respond to crimes after they have happened by documenting criminal activity, which aids subsequent prosecution, the city said.
“The cameras and new network infrastructure, installed by the Department of Information Technology, are a significant technological upgrade over the previous analog system, which was installed more than 20 years ago,” the city’s news release states. “Each new camera records 360-degree footage and comes with pan-tilt-zoom functionality, allowing anyone monitoring the cameras to closely examine points or persons of interest.”
Despite the city’s need to quell crime in Chinatown, others have expressed concerns over added powers of high-tech police surveillance versus the public’s rights to privacy.
“I think what sets this apart from a lot of other technologies is that it is really, really high-tech and state of the art. … This level of analytics when it comes to surveillance is extremely alarming,” Jongwook “Wookie” Kim, legal director for ACLU of Hawaii, previously told the Star-Advertiser. “To be clear, it invades the privacy of not just people who are doing things that might be illegal; it impacts every single person.”
He added that such technology — which has the ability to powerfully zoom in on people to photograph and record them — could have a chilling effect on the general public.
“Just knowing that the government and, specifically, the Police Department is watching over your every move when you are in an area, it’s going to chill you and prevent you from doing things you might otherwise do,” he said. “And that’s not the type of society that we want, and it’s not the type of society our constitutions permit.”
He noted that privacy rights found in both the U.S. Constitution — under the Fourth Amendment, which prevents unreasonable searches and seizures by the government on individuals — and under the Hawaii Constitution’s Article 1, Sections 6 and 7, also come into play.
“Hawaii has its own free-standing rights to privacy,” Kim said, “and Section 7 is most analogous to the federal Fourth Amendment in that it talks about unreasonable searches and seizures but it also talks about invasions of privacy.”
According to Scheuring, HPD’s overt video monitoring to prevent crime in Chinatown as well as Waikiki was established by law — under Ordinance 59 — in 1998.
The estimated total cost of the Chinatown security camera system upgrade is $980,000, with approximately $450,000 of the funds coming from federal state and local fiscal recovery funds, the city said.
