DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Street security cameras in a popular Daytona Beach entertainment district are getting closer to being a new tool for police. City leaders have been talking about installing cameras along Seabreeze Boulevard after a recent spike in crime.
Now the mayor said they are ready to install them but the city has run into a small issue — they need places to put them.
There’s a supply chain issue right now with getting the eight poles those cameras would attach to. The mayor is turning to businesses asking if they would allow them to mount the cameras on the corners of their buildings so the city can get this started much quicker.
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“I don’t know of a business that doesn’t want to catch a criminal,” said Mayor Derrick Henry.
Henry said the money and technology are ready but the poles the cameras would attach to will take six months to get in. He said city leaders and the police department want eyes on Seabreeze Boulevard much sooner than that.
“We will pay for the camera and pay for the cost of construction, but we will need the businesses to partner with us and allow us to use their electricity,” he said.
The cameras the city will install will give police real-time access to monitor the area, hopefully to catch suspects sooner.
The city said police have responded to over 1,400 calls in the Seabreeze area in the last two years, including two murders and two shootings.
For those, police had to wait for businesses to give them security camera footage to see the incidents, sometimes days after they happened.
“Most of the businesses on the block are safe places but every once in a while something happens and we want to help the police find out who did it as quickly as possible,” said Rick Kitt, owner of Daytona Tap Room on Seabreeze.
By the end of this month, the mayor said FDOT will also have new lighting and crosswalks installed and the police department will be opening a substation off Seabreeze.
Kitt thinks the cameras will be an added bonus and said he’d have no problem helping the city out and thinks it could give customers some peace of mind.
“I mean what’s it going to cost me? Fifty cents in electricity? No, it won’t be a problem whatsoever,” he said.
The mayor said they would add more cameras to the Seabreeze area once the poles do come in and look at adding additional lighting to parking lots off the strip.
From there he said they will be working with the city’s budget to add cameras to other parts of the city where they’ve also seen crime spikes.
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