CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Amid one of the deadliest years in Charlotte history, a Defenders investigation found 80 of some of the city's most critical crime-solving tools did not work and still don't work.
The city operates more than 450 cameras at intersections across Charlotte that monitor traffic and feed into the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department's Real Time Crime Center.
Work orders show the city placed dozens of those cameras out of order in 2019 and some of them remained broken for months at a time.
"Out of 450 cameras, this many of them are bad? That's a total breakdown in our bureaucracy," Action NC Political Director Robert Dawkins said. "I haven't seen a bureaucrat here in Charlotte that I'd give an A for their job. This is an F."
Police and prosecutors credit the cameras, operated by the Charlotte Department of Transportation, with helping identify homicide suspects and secure criminal convictions.
"Detectives and officers from all investigative units and patrol divisions have used the cameras to solve crimes across the spectrum – hit and run cases to homicides," CMPD spokesperson Sirlena June said.
Dawkins can only wonder how many more crimes police could solve if all of the cameras actually worked all of the time.
"It's just a total breakdown in our bureaucracy," he said. "Technology is only as good as the people that are inspecting it and what we're finding on all of the bureaucrats' level in Charlotte is none are good at inspecting it."
With 18% of CDOT's cameras on the agency's fault list, the city is now pledging to do better.
"What good is a camera if it doesn't work?" we asked.
"Oh, absolutely," CDOT Engineering Operations Division Manager Charles Abel said.
Abel said in a perfect world, no camera would ever break and those that do, the city would fix immediately.
"We are seeing an uptick in the number of cameras that have failed," Abel said. "Our goal is to get them up as soon as possible...It's a frustrating point for us, the folks that use them every day. It makes our job much harder."
"Some of these cameras haven't worked for months at a time," we said. "Shouldn't taxpayers expect better than that?"
"Well, absolutely. We would love to have them up, like I say, 100% of the time, but due to the constraints that we're working under with funding and staffing levels, we're doing the best job we can," Abel responded.
The city originally installed the cameras to monitor traffic, but what started as five cameras 20 years ago strictly meant to keep tabs on traffic has evolved to hundreds of cameras that serve CMPD too and the city adds roughly 25 new cameras every year.
Abel said resources have not grown with the program, which means when a camera goes down, there isn't enough money or staff to quickly make the repairs. Those repairs can range from simple to complex.
Abel said the age of the technology, which now requires replacement instead of repairs, is also part of the problem.
"We've maxed out pretty much on what we can do with just CDOT forces," Abel said. "The funding level needs to evolve to the use of the cameras."
Even so, Abel said the city is committed to improving.
The 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte really changed the role of the cameras and with the Republican National Convention coming later this year, Abel said CDOT and CMPD are working together to hire contractors who will monitor the cameras for problems and fix them faster.
"We're hoping that we can jointly work together to get higher priority level for funding for repairs," Abel said. "That is a big step for us. In the past, we haven't been able to contract out work."
Abel said the goal is to have all of the cameras functioning by the RNC.
"We should be much better equipped to keep these cameras up and running," he said.
CDOT reports generally, about 10% of its cameras are out of service at any given time due to failures with hardware, software and/or the network. In addition, the agency said car crashes occasionally damage or take down poles and private developers sometimes ask to temporarily remove cameras and/or network infrastructure.
CDOT said its cameras experienced more than 260 issues throughout 2019.
"This would be equivalent to repairing 57% of our cameras over the year if each issue was a sperate camera," Media Relations & Strategic Communications Specialist Scierra N. Bratton said.
CDOT said the cost to install each camera ranges from $7,000 to $10,000. The amount of money the city's spent on equipment to repair the cameras has dropped steadily over the last three years from $35,997 in 2017 to $20,356 in 2019.
"We are reviewing how we track these costs to determine why costs have been dropping," Bratton said.
The agency receives monthly alerts about camera faults and is notified when CDOT or CMPD staff notice a feed is down. Moving forward, CDOT said the hope is to receive more timely alerts.
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