Councillors cool to idea of CCTV as solution to illegal dumping in city centre

CCTV is not a “silver bullet, this will not solve all our illegal dumping problems”, one of the council officials in charge of rolling it out told councillors on Tuesday.

The process for putting in cameras is long and slow and cumbersome, council litter prevention officer Bernie Lillis said at a meeting of the Central Area Committee.

And even when they’re set up – at first on three streets in the north inner-city – it’ll be hard to gather evidence using the new CCTV systems to use in prosecutions of illegal dumpers, Lillis said.

“It will be a problem trying to get evidence because I don’t know how many vehicles are dumping there,” Lillis said.

“We’re only able to use the registration numbers of the vehicle,” she said. “We will not be able to use any footage of people who are walking about the street with a bag in their hand who are dumping.”

“That needs to be made very, very clear, we can only use the registration number of a vehicle where we can track people,” Lillis said.

“I know people don’t want to hear that story but I think that we have to be open, we have to be honest with you and tell you what we can and can’t do,” she said.

The plan is for the council’s two-person CCTV project team, which includes Lillis, to work through the process for the rest of this year to try to get permission to set up CCTV on Belvedere Place, Sherrard Street Lower, and Summer Street North, she said.

So those systems might be set up sometime next year – Lillis said she could not give a specific timeline.

For councillors at the meeting, that was clearly too vague, too little, too slow. Fine Gael Councillor Ray McAdam said all this “really isn’t acceptable”.

Lillis said: “Councillor McAdam may be underwhelmed but let me tell  you we were overwhelmed when we saw the amount of documentation and the amount of work that was involved in this.”

She said she and her colleague, Daragh Jacques, were “working very very hard on this, we are devoting a lot of our time to this, we are working at night time to make sure we have everything in place, we are treating it as urgent”.

Long, slow process

In a report to councillors, the CCTV project team explained the process to councillors.

For each location they want to put in a CCTV system, the council has to gather evidence to justify the need for the cameras.

According to the report, that includes “site inspections, surveys of illegal dumping, retrieving records of requests/complaints received”.

Then they need to complete a site-specific data protection impact assessment, prepare a business case, and work through a number of standard operating procedures, the report says. Then it’s time for local consultation.

All the documentation and the results of the consultation have to be submitted to the executive manager for approval, and if that’s granted it goes to an oversight board, and if that board recommends it to the council’s chief executive, he must sign off on it.

Then there’s the work of actually setting up the CCTV system. The council in April issued a tender asking for bids from companies interested in doing that.

All this must be done for each location where the council wants to set up a CCTV system to deter people dumping rubbish illegally – or catch them if they’re not deterred.

“It’s just the two of us working on this and it is a monumental task,” Lillis said.

After hearing about the process, obstacles, and limitations involved in the new scheme, councillors extended their sympathies to Lillis and Jacques.

Independent Councillor Cieran Perry said that he didn’t intend his earlier criticism of the council’s slow pace in rolling out anti-dumping CCTV for Lillis or Jacques personally.

But “Clearly what you’ve confirmed today is that there is a lack of urgency, because if there’s only two of you, and anyone who’s working outside their working hours by definition hasn’t got the resources to deploy.”

Not only that, if the new system was only going to allow processing of vehicle registration plates for evidence, it’s no good, Perry said. “If you can’t process people themselves then the legislation is kind of useless,” he said.

Lillis said: “We are very limited, because basically they didn’t really want cameras anywhere.”

Sinn Féin Councillor Janice Boylan thanked Lillis for telling councillors about the limitations of the scheme. There’s been a lot of talk about CCTV solving the illegal dumping problem in the north inner-city, Boylan said.

“I think rather than kind of hoping for this saviour of all saviours to come along – it’s far from going to provide that,” she said. “We need to be moving away from it and looking at other alternatives from what I can see.”

Said Green Party Councillor Janet Horner: “We do need to be cognisant of the limitations of CCTV so we can direct our efforts towards things that can have a greater impact.”