Mayor Justin Bibb this week encouraged Clevelanders to give police easier access to their home security camera footage.
Cleveland is using a technology platform called Fusus that can integrate privately owned security cameras into the police real-time crime center. The platform is now owned by Axon, the company formerly known as Taser that also provides the city with body cameras.
At a well-attended town hall at John F. Kennedy High School on the city’s Southeast Side, the mayor asked the audience if they knew about Fusus. Most didn’t.
Bibb said that he and city officials would “go door to door and get you guys signed up for your Ring cameras to be in our real-time crime center.”
The city’s SAFE SMART CLE camera-sharing program has two levels of participation. At the lower level, camera owners can register with the city. That doesn’t grant police instant access to a given camera, according to City Hall. Instead, the registry helps police locate private cameras near an incident so they can request footage more quickly.
The higher level, called “integration,” does give police access to the live feeds of privately owned cameras. This option is available for businesses rather than homeowners, according to the city. Police could access the camera feed as needed but wouldn’t monitor it 24/7, City Hall said.
LaShorn Caldwell, a Mt. Pleasant resident who showed up that cold Wednesday night to talk with the mayor, has mixed feelings about surveillance cameras. She is fine with police cameras on the street. But sharing her Ring camera is different.
“People still have to have their privacy,” she told Signal Cleveland. “I got grandkids, they run up and down and play. I will have to do some more research, but I don’t want to be exposed like that.”
There are already thousands of cameras in Cleveland’s SAFE SMART CLE system. According to the city, 1,371 cameras are on the registry and 3,144 have been integrated.
Key police oversight staffer calls it quits
Marcus Perez is resigning as head of Cleveland’s Office of Professional Standards. He broke the news in an interview with News 5 Cleveland.
He left a clue that he was on his way out at Wednesday’s City Council budget hearing. There, he told council that it would be his last budget season with them.
OPS investigates citizen complaints against police officers and refers cases to the Civilian Police Review Board for disciplinary recommendations.
Perez’s departure comes after the Bibb administration said OPS circulated a link to an internal dashboard that contained “sensitive criminal justice information.” The link went to City Council, the U.S. Justice Department, the consent decree monitoring team and union leaders, although none of them had email addresses that allowed them to access the dashboard, according to City Hall.
The episode was enough for the city to publicly chastise OPS in a news release. City Hall spokesperson Sarah Johnson wrote to Signal Cleveland that the city “temporarily paused access to this dashboard.”
According to Johnson, the dashboard included such information as the names and addresses of complainants and officers. As of late Friday morning, the Bibb administration had not received a resignation letter from Perez, she wrote.
Perez told News 5 that he had been putting together a dashboard of police complaints that contained public information. He did not return a call from Signal Cleveland in time for this newsletter.
Anyone who wants to file a complaint about police can still do so by filling out a form on the city’s website, Johnson wrote.
