Another Fort Worth city department is getting ready to deploy new surveillance cameras. Code Compliance will join the Fort Worth Police Department in purchasing new mobile cameras.
Code Compliance will spend nearly $200,000 on the new cameras with an emphasis on catching illegal dumping.
"We are looking at 20 of the larger cameras and 60 of the covert cameras,” Director Brandon Bennett explained. "That's critical because one of the things we want to do is be able to capture what the person looked like who was doing the dumping,”
“We want to capture the type of vehicle they were driving and we want to capture the license plate," he added.
Bennett said illegal dumping costs the city about $1.2 million every year and he is confident the new cameras will make a major difference.
“We will deploy these in areas that are somewhat remote,” Bennett said. “We’ll [also] do it in neighborhoods. There are places where you will have high density housing where you have a dead end street. We’ll do it wherever the need is the greatest.”
The deployment will start with a partial roll-out where bugs can be worked out.
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“We hope to have ours up and running in the next 60 to 90 days,” he said.
Bennett said Code Compliance will work closely with the Fort Worth police and neighborhood services in utilizing the cameras for the betterment of the city.
“Crime and grime go together. So, if you look at where the crime is, that’s also where the grime is,” Bennett said. “If we all work together and we clean up an area, it will drive the crime rate down.”
The Fort Worth Police Department spent nearly $1 million on mobile surveillance cameras earlier this month.
