BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — Bakersfield is enhancing public safety by expanding its Verkada camera systems across local parks. The Bakersfield City Council has approved $300,000 for the Parks and Recreation Department to install 21 cameras in Planz, Jefferson, Patriots, Greystone, and Central Park.
Bill Owens explained that he selection process for these parks was data-driven. “We went out to survey of city staff, Ranger staff, looked at calls for service complaints, and took that information, and we developed our next five parks based on that data,” he said.
The cameras have already proven effective in some parks, such as Jastro Park, where they helped identify a suspect in the vandalism of the Veterans Memorial. Owens described how the system works: “Each of these squares is a geo fence that I can go in and say if I’ve seen movement in that area. I want to be notified of it. And what it would look like is you see the squares, so the squares are picking up individuals, those green squares, right. Yeah, so we don’t care about birds or dogs or so it uses technology to say, ‘Hey, that’s a person.’ And then we could pull that up and go back and review that footage.”…