Budget hampers plan to upgrade Pretoria's CCTV cameras

Published Jun 3, 2019

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Pretoria - The R18 million budget set aside to address problems related to CCTV cameras is not enough and will hamstring efforts by the City of Tshwane to migrate cameras from analogue to digital.

This is according to the Community Safety MMC Karen Meyer, who in March told the Pretoria News that by May 31, all the 300 cameras would be operational. More than 100 cameras in the CBD had been non-operational.

Police bemoaned that they were unable to review criminal incidents due to the inactive cameras.

But Meyer said: “The issue is that we only received R18m for CCTV cameras. We are sitting with analogue and we would like to go all digital. However, our current budget won’t allow us to do so. “

She said the City had a strategy to forge partnerships with other entities such as security companies to overcome the problem.

“We do believe that there are people who have the necessary technology and we can work with them.”

She disclosed that the City’s contract with the current service provider responsible for manning cameras was still in place until the end of June.

“The new tender will go out and we have also asked for engineers to tell us about what is needed from an engineering point of view, so that we don’t make mistakes by putting in stuff that is outdated,” Meyer said.

Executive mayor Stevens Mokgalapa previously said the new plan would include installing cameras at the main entrances to the townships.

Asked whether the plans were still on course, Meyer said: “With the R18m budget it’s just too small to do what we really want. We had talks with other entities and they said they were willing to help us with cameras, especially in the townships. At the end of the day if we can have cameras throughout the city, every single part of the city, can you imagine what type of safe city we can be?

Pretoria News

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City of Tshwane