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.
Thirty-five earthquakes have exceeded 5.5 on the Richter scale so far this year, the most in 14 years, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said on Facebook on Thursday. A large earthquake in Hualien County on April 3 released five times as much the energy as the 921 Earthquake on Sept. 21, 1999, the agency said in its latest earthquake report for this year. Hualien County has had the most national earthquake alerts so far this year at 64, with Yilan County second with 23 and Changhua County third with nine, the agency said. The April 3 earthquake was what caused the increase in
INTIMIDATION: In addition to the likely military drills near Taiwan, China has also been waging a disinformation campaign to sow division between Taiwan and the US Beijing is poised to encircle Taiwan proper in military exercise “Joint Sword-2024C,” starting today or tomorrow, as President William Lai (賴清德) returns from his visit to diplomatic allies in the Pacific, a national security official said yesterday. Commenting on condition of anonymity, the official said that multiple intelligence sources showed that China is “highly likely” to launch new drills around Taiwan. Although the drills’ scale is unknown, there is little doubt that they are part of the military activities China initiated before Lai’s departure, they said. Beijing at the same time is conducting information warfare by fanning skepticism of the US and
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is unlikely to attempt an invasion of Taiwan during US president-elect Donald Trump’s time in office, Taiwanese and foreign academics said on Friday. Trump is set to begin his second term early next year. Xi’s ambition to establish China as a “true world power” has intensified over the years, but he would not initiate an invasion of Taiwan “in the near future,” as his top priority is to maintain the regime and his power, not unification, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University distinguished visiting professor and contemporary Chinese politics expert Akio Takahara said. Takahara made the comment at a
DEFENSE: This month’s shipment of 38 modern M1A2T tanks would begin to replace the US-made M60A3 and indigenous CM11 tanks, whose designs date to the 1980s The M1A2T tanks that Taiwan expects to take delivery of later this month are to spark a “qualitative leap” in the operational capabilities of the nation’s armored forces, a retired general told the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) in an interview published yesterday. On Tuesday, the army in a statement said it anticipates receiving the first batch of 38 M1A2T Abrams main battle tanks from the US, out of 108 tanks ordered, in the coming weeks. The M1 Abrams main battle tank is a generation ahead of the Taiwanese army’s US-made M60A3 and indigenously developed CM11 tanks, which have
RSS