Eight live-feed security cameras, costing the City of Columbia $25,000, were recently installed downtown.

The cameras will be watched live during peak-times and simply recording during non-peak times downtown. Columbia Police Department defines peak-times as 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. Thursday through Sunday.

Aside from the fact there’s some sort of Big Brother creeper being associated with the live-feed, is it actually going to help anything?

The idea is that simply the presence of the security cameras will deter crime, but the cameras aren’t really very noticeable.

In addition, will the live-feed help anything the regular camera won’t? The police will still have to investigate or send a unit to the scene if they see a crime happening. Hopefully, crimes are called in quickly by victims or passersby, so are the live-feeds actually expediting any process a regular camera doesn’t?

In addition, is there any data to show more crime happens during peak periods when there are a lot of people around? Is there data showing that more crime happens downtown rather than other parts of Columbia?

The police officers who spent their time and money training at the police academy should be serving and protecting, not sitting behind a mall cop-style security feed, and the tax payers deserve more, too. We believe police resources will be more preventative and better spent elsewhere.

That’s not all we take issue with. The security cameras were voted on last spring. Although approved, the proposal made it clear these cameras would not be live-feed. City Council approved this measure, thinking they were approving record-only security cameras, and now they’re sliding this by without telling anyone?

This entire act has been shady. Live-feed was not approved, and frankly, we don’t see how it’s helping anything.

Crime happens. Even if these barely-there cameras deter one criminal, there are plenty more who won’t even notice it. For those, they’ll have just as much time to get away as someone who has his crime called in just after it happens.

There will also be just as much evidence against someone who was recorded on a camera that only records.
Switching the type of camera after a vote is shady and uncalled-for, but something we could forgive if there was more proof it was warranted.