SurveillanceCook County, Illinois cancels troubled security camera program

Contrary to the latest trends, Cook County, Illinois is scrapping a project to equip police departments with real time streaming cameras.

Cook County board president Toni Preckwinkle recently canceled Project Shield, a $44 million federally funded initiative to provide 128 local police departments with cameras in squad cars and stationary locations that streamed live video to central command centers.

Since its inception, the program has been plagued by technical problems, cost overruns, and shoddy performance.

“The problems in the Project Shield program have been well-documented in the past and we undertook a careful review of the problems in light of those issues,” Preckwinkle said.

“The system was … ill-conceived, poorly designed and badly executed,” added Mike Masters, the Cook County director of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

The county let IBM, its first contractor for Project Shield, go after the company’s repeated equipment failures, and IBM’s replacement, Johnson Controls International, was no better.

The program also contained a critical safety flaw that went unnoticed for seven years.

According to Masters, if a squad car’s airbags deployed, the computer and camera would become projectiles that could seriously injure officers. Since discovering this fact, the county has ordered the contractors to immediately remove all the cameras and computers installed in squad cars.

Project Shield is still in the midst of an ongoing federal investigation.

In 2009 Representative Mike Quigley ( X – Illinois) called the project “a scandal” and asked that the General Accounting Office investigate the program. Quigley also jointly requested with then Congressman Mark Kirk a DHS Inspector General probe into the program.

Federal inspectors in turn invited the FBI to join the investigation.