Winchester to purchase cameras for park, pool
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By Carmen Ensinger
Thieves, vandals and even wanted criminals might want to think twice about even entering Winchester once they get their new camera systems in place.
The Winchester City Council voted to purchase cameras and a video recording system to cover the park and pool area and a special License Plate Reader (LPR) camera for the three-way stop at a cost of $8,100 at their June 7 council meeting.
Winchester Police Chief Steve Doolin broke the coverage down into several different sections for the city but noted that covering the park and pool was the most important.
“We had two incidents the first week the pool was open,” Doolin said. “They were serious enough that it resulted in one person being cited and the other one was an alleged gun display. I don’t think it happened (it was reported by a minor), but there are no facts to prove it (didn’t happen).”
The LPR camera is simply a camera mounted on a pole at the three-way stop. It is a special camera with the capability of capturing the license plate numbers of vehicles even at night. These plate numbers are then searched in an FBI database to see if there are any active warrants issued for them, or the owner of the vehicle.
Doolin said the LPR cameras are a very valuable tool to have when trying to prove a case against someone.
“I got a call one morning early of a male Hispanic with a prosthetic leg with tatoos in town who was very bad news,” Doolin said. “He claimed his car was stolen and he was being chase by two guys with guns with lasers on them. They were able to prove, thanks to people’s video cameras, that he parked his car there and ran from it. We tracked him through the LPR cameras. He left Chicago on May 20 and went to California and then the Mexican border.”
Doolin said the cameras work day or night and focuses on the plate number.
“It reads the plate and it can be tied in through the DEA nationwide database, and so if you are looking for a vehicle and it goes by any of those LPR cameras, you get a hit and it tells you where they have been,” Doolin said. “Just recently, they caught a guy up in Jacksonville using these cameras.”
Aldermen thought they already had a camera system in place, but Doolin said what they were using was basically useless.
“The cameras you currently have, those little white ones that you are paying a monthly fee for, do not store video,” he said. “They are live feed only, so they are absolutely worthless unless someone is monitoring it because it can’t record or play back. So, I would cancel those immediately because you are just wasting your money on those.”
The other areas that Doolin would like to see cameras installed in would be the police and fire department and rooftop cameras to blanket the square area and city hall.
Mayor Rex McIntire hopes that just the presence of the cameras will be a deterrant.
“I think good lighting and cameras are two of the best and cheapest ways of deterring some of the criminal activity we are seeing going on,” he said. “If they know we have the capability of identifying them, they are going to be less likely to commit the crime and with this camera system, we will have that ability.”
