KPRC's Dean reports on Park-and-Pillage failures; METRO tries to shield data from public
KPRC-2's Stephen Dean reports that METRO's ongoing experiment with camera surveillance as a replacement for live security officers at the Park-and-Pillage lots is still going poorly:
The Houston Metropolitan Transit Authority reported that 271 camera failure reports have been filed since January 2008, with 10 instances of entire Park & Ride lots being offline and invisible to police officers who are supposed to watch the cameras for crime.
Some METRO police officers told Local 2 Investigates the problem is much more widespread than those numbers suggest. Those officers said they are being posted at Park & Ride lots nearly every day in response to crimes that were never detected by the network of 354 cameras.
A well-run, responsive public organization might reconsider the whole cameras-as-replacement-for-security gambit.
METRO, on the other hand, responded as it usually does:
METRO transit headquarters has filed documents in an effort to keep quiet about its camera failures. In response to a Local 2 Investigates request for complete camera maintenance and outage reports, METRO filed with the Texas Attorney General, asking that the documents be kept secret.
That's outrageous -- but not surprising.
Recall that METRO chief Frank "Procurement Disaster" Wilson once asserted that METRO operates "in a completely transparent manner."
Right!
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Photo by flickr user Andyrob used via a Creative Commons license.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 09/26/09 02:01 PM | Houston Transit | Print | Comments (8)
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