How much does a camera cost?

The Lens identified $17 million worth of purchase orders for surveillance equipment, software and payroll over the last four years.

The upfront cost of a New Orleans police surveillance camera ranges from $1,094 to $8,263 each, according to purchase orders and invoices obtained by The Lens. But that’s only the beginning.

The city puts the cameras in metal encasements, often fitted with red and blue flashing lights, which can cost up to $2,000 each, according to purchase orders. After that, the city has to purchase equipment to mount the cameras ($72 per camera), a fee to connect the camera to the city’s video management software ($225 per camera) and labor costs of unpacking, assembling and mounting the cameras ($125 an hour) . And there are other purchases that appear necessary for upfront installation for at least some of the cameras, such as 15 foot cables for street light mounted cameras ($180 each).

But those still pale in comparison to what the city will have to pay over time in annual costs. In order to beam live footage to the city’s Real Time Crime Center, the cameras need to be connected to the internet. Invoices show that internet costs for a single camera are $159 a month, or $1,908 a year. Based on those costs, the city is likely paying over $1 million a year just to connect the 555 city-owned cameras to the internet.

Purchase orders show other annual costs as well, including $33 a year per camera to connect to the city’s video management system and $45 a year per camera for a license to the Genetec Advantage software.

Those costs don’t account for the annual maintenance retainers the city pays for the camera fleet as a whole, or the various repairs and upgrades the Real Time Crime Center does every year.

At a 2020 budget hearing, Colin Arnold, director of the city’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, explained that the cameras need constant upkeep to keep working. He said that in 2021, they were going to be installing new ventilation systems on all the cameras to deal with the summer heat.

“I can’t really stress enough that the cameras are not this kind of set it and forget it thing,” Arnold said at the meeting. “If you don't maintain them, they won't work. So maintenance is a large part of what we’re doing.”

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The city has argued that the investment in the Real Time Crime Center is a “force multiplier” that can relieve officers of certain time consuming tasks, like collecting and reviewing video evidence, and let them get back to more important tasks.

After the first year of the RTCC’s operation, then-NOPD Superintendent Michael Harrison said it had saved the NOPD roughly “2,000 man-hours.” That’s equivalent to just under a year of work for an officer working 40-hour weeks.

Meanwhile, over the last four years, the city of New Orleans has issued at least $17 million in purchase orders for surveillance equipment, software and personnel, according to documents obtained by The Lens. But there were almost certainly additional expenses related to the city’s surveillance network that weren’t captured in The Lens’ analysis.

The vast majority of the $17 million in spending — XX — was for the city’s Real Time Crime Center and fleet of surveillance cameras and license plate readers.

The Real Time Crime Center, or RTCC, is part of the city’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, rather than the police department. The Lens obtained all purchase orders and invoices from that office from 2017 through 2020. But the city doesn’t track whether specific expenses were related to the RTCC versus other functions within the homeland security office, which has several other responsibilities including hurricane and pandemic responses.

The Lens only included homeland security expenses that were explicitly linked to the RTCC. Documents showed millions more in additional homeland security expenses that may have been related to the RTCC, but couldn't be definitively linked — including office supplies, energy bills, computer parts and maintenance costs.

Additionally, the city said in 2017 that it spent $5 million renovating the RTCC building and facility. It’s unclear exactly what was included in that $5 million figure, but The Lens analysis didn’t include any construction or general contracting spending.

The city was able to separate RTCC payroll records from the rest of the homeland security office, which showed $3.3 million in payroll expenses since December 2017.

The Lens identified another $2 million in surveillance-related purchase orders through other city departments, mostly the New Orleans Police Department. The NOPD expenditures were mostly for license plate reader hardware and various surveillance software programs. (Both the NOPD and RTCC have made license plate reader purchases, but the city says they are all managed by the NOPD.)

When The Lens requested all of the NOPD’s purchase orders and contracts from the last three years, the city responded with a several documents but said that they were “all that the Police Department was able to locate after an extensive search; however, it may not represent all responsive records.”

Funding Sources

Some anti-surveillance advocates in New Orleans argue that the money spent on the Real Time Crime Center and other surveillance tools would be better utilized for other city services that could help stem violence, like education, social services and economic development.

But a lot of the funding for the upfront costs of surveillance equipment has been provided by sources outside of city government. The money is often contributed specifically for surveillance purposes, meaning the city cannot necessarily shift those resources elsewhere.

The RTCC and the city’s modern camera and license plate reader networks were part of a $40 million public safety plan under former-Mayor Mitch Landrieu. Of that $40 million, $23 million came from the city’s Convention Center — a publicly-funded, state-created body. At the time, high profile shootings on Bourbon Street were seen by tourism leaders as a threat to the industry.

The city has continued to secure state and federal grants since then. And the city opened up a permanent channel for outside funding when it started the Safecam Platinum program, which allows residents and businesses to send live video feeds to the RTCC from their privately-owned cameras.

Tracey Rosenberg, an Oakland based privacy advocate, said that city officials are very likely to accept funding for surveillance, whether or not they independently think the investment is important.

"They will say yes 98 percent of the time. That's because municipal budgets are strained, they get asked for money all the time and they don’t have a lot. So the idea they can get something that's subsidized, anything, is really appealing.”

She said “it goes against every political instinct” to turn down free money. But local New Orleans advocates argue that it isn’t really free, because after the upfront installation of surveillance resources like cameras, the burden of maintaining that equipment falls to the city.

“We think these things are free but we end up paying more than we get in value,” said Marvin Arnold, an privacy advocate and organizer with Eye on Surveillance. “It's a duping of outside forces to make the city think these things are free. But nothing is ever free.”