A Crying Need for Security Cameras

The New York City Housing Authority owns 178,895 apartments housing 615,000 low-income tenants.In essence that makes NYCHA New York's biggest landlord.

NYCHA has been in existence for 80 years now, dating back to 1934 when Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia established it as the nation's first public housing authority. In 1935 he cut the ribbon on its first public housing development, First Houses, on the  Lower East Side site where tenements had previously stood. These apartments had  private kitchens and baths, electrical outlets,  refrigerators, and stoves, veritable luxuries for the 11,000 applicants who hoped to move into one of the project's 123 apartments.

The clusters of high-rise high-density buildings that sprung up in every borough were called  public housing developments, but known to city residents as "The Projects."  The road, however was taking a gradual slant downhill.  By the time this author was growing up in upper Manhattan, in the 1950's and 60's, the neighborhood projects, pictured at right, while having a bad

reputation, were, in actuality, not really that much worse than the surrounding area. But then this might be because projects were only built in high-crime areas.
By the 70's and 80's,many projects had sunk to the level of unsafe, violent  pits of crime.And so it remains. A tenant in the Baruch houses on the Lower East Side told The Villager, a local community paper, that she takes a hammer with her each time she goes into the hallway or elevator.

Security Cameras ????
A survey conducted in 2012 in the Baruch Houses polled 520 residents. 80% said they would feel safer with cameras. This begs the question why, in a city where the New York Police Department maintains 7,000 surveillance cameras, mostly in Manhattan's downtown business and tourist areas, are there no IP camera surveillance systems in public housing?

The answer is, actually there are.  NYC has not abandoned the projects. At the time of the survey, it was found that  the city had allocated  funds for security upgrades, but $42 million of that money was sitting unused in the housing authority's coffers, along with an additional $750,000 specifically earmarked for cameras. The Baruch Houses had installed cameras - but only in six out of its ten buildings.

What brought this travesty to the forefront was a shooting in the nearby Seward Park Houses where a police officer had chased a man into the stairwell of one of the buildings, who then turned around and shot him point-blank in the chest. His bullet-proof vest saved him but questions arose as to whether the presence of a surveillance camera  in the stairway, might have allowed police to capture the fugitive without putting an officer in the line of fire

It Takes a Tragedy
This past Sunday, two young children a six-year-old boy and a seven-year-old girl were stabbed in an an elevator in the Boulevard Houses in Brooklyn as they interrupted adult-supervised play on the project's grassy area to go upstairs to bring back some ice cream. The girl remained in intensive care all week, and was just transferred to critical care on Thursday. The boy was buried today. The Boulevard Houses have no security cameras.

And it's not the only one. Investigations by a city galvanized by the tragedy found that only 58% of its 334 projects have cameras on their grounds. Of these, only 41% have "some" cameras in the buildings, leaving the majority of elevators, lobbies, and stairways un-monitored.



It  also brought to light that $27 million the city funded to NYCHA in 2013 for the purpose of outfitting 49 housing projects with surveillance cameras still sits buried in what New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio (who'd made public housing a campaign priority)  calls "unacceptable bureaucracy."



Declaring that "the buck stops here," the mayor vowed that the $27 million would be freed up, and the 49 projects, including Boulevard, would see functioning cameras by year's end.

Weighing in from the Bronx, a city council member on the committee overseeing public housing asked "how much violence has to occur before we begin to address the widespread plea for greater security, for greater cameras?" and estimated it would take another $500 million to install cameras in every housing project.

A City Joins Forces

As the community rallied to find the killer, police were able to put together a sketch from neighbors who'd seen a man in a grey shirt fleeing the projects before the children were discovered. It resembled a homeless man who had been hanging out on the grounds and hallways and depending on residents for food. When the

media circulated the drawing, a man who'd witnessed another stabbing, one that had taken place in a subway station the following Wednesday identified the man as the person who'd wielded the knife. Forensic evidence found in the elevator and the subway station was found to belong to a mentally-ill man recently released from prison. The NYPD managed to find him and arrest him the same day.

This was a case of tremendous cooperation between the community, the media, and the police but still the question remains. While a surveillance camera in the elevator or lobby in all sad likelihood wouldn't have prevented the senseless killing, might it have led to a speedier apprehension, perhaps preventing the subway stabbing?

Let's hope that Mayor DeBlasio follows through on his promise.

Kintronics was instrumental in installing IP surveillance camera systems in a private housing development in NYC, Parkchester, in the Bronx. Since one of these cameras helped  identify a suspect in a brutal robbery, we are always sensitive to the role cameras can play in bringing criminals to justice. Should you be interested in finding out more about IP cameras, IP door access control, or other IP-based solutions call 914-944-3425 to speak to a sales engineer or fill out an information request form.