Taipei’s more than 13,000 surveillance cameras are mostly older models facing imminent obsolescence and cause signal integration problems with newer models, which could result in a public security crisis, a city councilor said yesterday.
Taipei City Councilor Lin Shih-tsung (林世宗) of the Democratic Progressive Party said the administration of former Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) in 2009 initiated a project to install 13,699 analogue surveillance cameras in communities and along roads in the city, which Lin said have been discontinued by their manufacturers.
An investigation by Lin found that the warranty for about 75 percent of these cameras is set to expire in March next year, while the warranty for the rest is to run out by the end of next year.
Furthermore, the cameras’ manufacturers said that they would cease making parts compatible with the models installed by the city.
Lin said the Taipei Police Department only has 559 backup cameras in stock to replace malfunctioning devices, meaning that the majority of the devices currently in service would be disposed of if they malfunction.
Exacerbating the problem, an ongoing project to install 1,717 digital surveillance cameras has proven problematic, as about 800 devices have experienced technical difficulties transmitting images, purportedly due to an incompatibility between connectors and software for the different models, Lin said.
This could spell trouble for the city in maintaining public security and controlling traffic in the near future, he said.
Lin said that the analogue cameras cost the city government about NT$128 million (US$3.91 million), which would go to waste if they are replaced with digital models, as doing so would also require the installation of new consoles.
He called on Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) to launch an investigation into officials who authorized the “wasteful” procurement of what he called an “old stock” of cameras.
Ko said that he had asked experts at National Chiao Tung University and National Tsing Hua University to assist in the matter.
“Actually, closed-circuit TV cameras are not only employed by the police department, but also by the Hydraulic Engineering Office, the Department of Education and the Department of Transportation,” Ko said.
“This is a serious problem. The agencies have already called an internal meeting over how to integrate the cameras,” he added.
Taipei Police Department Deputy Commissioner Chou Shou-sung (周壽松) said that due to a limited budget at the time of the project’s inception, the number of digital surveillance cameras that the city government could afford constituted only about 3 percent of the total.
Citing his experience from a fact-finding tour to the UK, in which he learned about the difficulties in maintaining and replacing surveillance cameras, Chou said that such issues would pose a major challenge for the city.
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