Auckland City Council disconnects expensive blended network of CCTV cameras

By RNZ’s Phil Pennington

Auckland City Council has pulled out of a plan to expand the city’s CCTV network because it would have cost too much.

Last year Auckland Transport embarked on a project to combine its own closed circuit television with the city council and the NZTA, building a unique network and adding hundreds or thousands of cameras more.

The council now says he withdrew after the first discussions.

“Any benefit was outweighed by the high cost, so we decided not to move forward,” the council told RNZ in a statement.

The use of CCTV by the city council, and in particular facial recognition technology, is a growing flash point in the US.

However, a wing of the Auckland Council that manages stadiums, the zoo and galleries is adding more cameras and upgrading others in 11 major locations.

Auckland Regional Facilities said the rise in video surveillance would increase the safety of people and the safety of assets without using facial recognition technology or analytics.

“The full scope of work … number of cameras, which sites will be prioritized and when, has yet to be confirmed,” he said.

“We will take a multi-year phased approach that aligns with our available budgets.”

Auckland’s Transportation plan had been to combine four separate systems in the city into one, with over 6,000 cameras by 2024 and the ability to expand to 8,000, up from 4,500-5,000 cameras today.

Auckland Transport told RNZ that it also did not use facial recognition.

Police can access the cameras, but said they did not use them for live surveillance.

Police recently, without any public notice and without consulting the Privacy Commissioner, agreed to a $ 23 million, 10-year upgrade to a biometric information system that they envision could be used to import CCTV signals.

The system, called Neoface, is supplied by the Japanese giant NEC.

It was being considered as part of a technology review ordered by the Police Commissioner after RNZ exposed a test of controversial facial recognition technology in May.

Wellington City Council has said that NEC was also behind a camera and sensor test in Wellington that ran from 2014 to mid-2018 and cost at least half a million dollars.

It appears on a recently updated Internal Affairs website.

An $ 80,000 sensor and camera platform that can listen to people and use behavioral analytics, aimed at reducing fighting, begging and graffiti, was shut down in 2018, the council told the media at the time. , reiterating that to RNZ again.

The system could also track foot traffic.

Some of the cameras in the system were incorporated into the council’s broader CCTV network.

A statement under the Official Information Act shows that the council transferred its behavior analysis cameras to its security camera network when it ended its association with NEC in August 2018.