Cameras watching on College Hill, and soon will be downtown

WCF Courier | February 10, 2005

CEDAR FALLS --- From his office or home, Police Chief Rick Ahlstrom can watch what's happening on College Hill.

The city installed three cameras above the College Hill business district last fall with the intention of keeping track of University of Northern Iowa homecoming crowds.

Those cameras are always on and constantly recording to a city file server.

With a peaceful homecoming event last fall, the cameras haven't been called into action for identifying trouble makers. Now they stand watching, acting as a deterrent for those who know of them and as a potential tool if trouble starts.

"We've been satisfied," Ahlstrom said. "We had one business owner say they would keep law abiding citizens away. But we've gotten a lot of support for them."

The complaint came from Richard Anderson, owner of Pour Richard's on College Hill.

He doesn't like the idea of cameras constantly monitoring what's happening on College Hill. But if the cameras are going to be on College Hill, he would like to see them also installed downtown.

And that's just what the city plans to do.

Cameras are scheduled to be installed downtown in the spring. It's too late to help in a Jan. 28 shooting incident. In that instance, a UNI student was shot in the leg. He was on the sidewalk in the 400 block.

Police have not been able to make any arrests in the case so far, mostly because no one claims to have seen the shooter, despite many people having been at the scene.

"A picture tells us a thousand words. The camera would have told us what it saw," Ahlstrom said.

The cameras can zoom in close enough to read license plates, or, for that matter, identify faces.

"Had I known what would happen downtown we would have found a way to get them installed sooner," Ahlstrom said.

According to Ahlstrom, the cameras are much easier to install in warmer weather, so they were waiting for spring to get them mounted.

One of the three cameras on College Hill has malfunctioned because of winter weather issues.

While some would complain the cameras serve a "big brother" role and are an intrusion, Ahlstrom has heard a great deal of positive feedback.

Community Main Street, which represents downtown business owners, asked the city to put the cameras in downtown.

"I think some of it is people are used to cameras in public places. It's become a normal part of everyday living," Ahlstrom said. "All the major retail stores have cameras. People have been very supportive of what we've done."

The cameras operate on the Internet and police access them through a password protected site.

The police department is working to get access to the cameras to all police cars in the computers in their squad cars.

The cameras were installed as a joint effort between the police and Cedar Falls Utilities. CFU wanted to install a wireless Internet access point on College Hill. That equipment is bundled with the camera installation to put what the camera sees on the web.

In addition, CFU users can use the wireless access to the Internet from their computers on College Hill.

The same type of arrangement is in the works for downtown.

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