At Nation’s Largest Project, Residents Welcome Big Brother

Queens Chronicle
Sep. 30, 2005

Nina Adams wants her CCTV. For six years, the chairwoman of the Queensbridge Tenants’ Association has been badgering elected officials for funds to install security cameras at her public housing development.

On Monday, she saw the result of her persistence, as Councilman Eric Gioia and New York City Housing Authority General Manager Douglas Apple announced a $2.25-million initiative to wire Queensbridge Houses with surveillance equipment. “This is a long time coming, and you don’t know how happy I am today,” Adams said. “These cameras, which are already in place at Astoria and Ravenswood Houses, will help deter crime here at Queensbridge too.”

Adams credited Gioia for helping get the cameras installed, after appeals to State Senator Cathy Nolan and Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney fell on deaf ears. “I could not ask for a better partner in our efforts to improve our neighborhood,” she said.

Queensbridge Houses is the nation’s largest public housing development. Built to house 7,000 people, it has 10,000 residents, according to the New York City Housing Authority, although unofficial estimates put the figure at 14,000 or more.

The development joins the more than 30 city housing projects that have been outfitted with security cameras since 1997. Reported crimes drop an average of 25 percent the first year after the devices are installed, a spokesman for the Housing Authority said. He added that crime in the nearby Ravenswood Houses project, which has had the cameras for three years, is down almost 27 percent this year.
Gioia secured the money for the cameras through his discretionary fund. “These security cameras will make Queensbridge residents feel safer when they come home to their families at night,” he said.

Eight cameras are already in place in the 26-building complex. Over the next 6 to 7 months, that number will rise to 254, said David Gonzalez, director of branch operations for Elcor International, which designed the system.

Gonzalez said the cameras, manufactured by Dedicated Micros, also monitor doors and hallways in the city’s hospitals and homeless shelters, survey military bases, and were used at the recent G-8 summit in Manhattan. They are more advanced than the ones installed three years ago in Ravenswood, with 32-times digital zoom and hard drives that store a month of 24-hour footage. Unlike older models, those installed in fixed positions in stairwells and elevators can also toggle and zoom. “These are the high end right now,” Gonzalez said.

Longtime tenant Raymond Normandeau said that only one resident had voiced opposition to the cameras at recent tenants association meetings. “I really, really like the idea,” he said. “If people think they’re being watched, they’re less likely to do things.”

He added that he hoped the cameras would deter drug dealers from using the complex’s elevators as restrooms. Crimes such as drug dealing have not declined as much as in the rest of the city, he said, although the area has quieted down somewhat since a large bust in February. “Within the last few months, gunshots were heard as often as twice a week. But we haven’t heard any in the last couple of weeks.”

Echoing Adams, Normandeau praised Gioia for taking an interest in Queensbridge. In addition to getting the cameras installed, the councilman helped organize a Little League baseball tournament for children living in Queensbridge and Ravenswood. An MTA shed that had blocked a sidewalk at 12th Street and 41st Avenue for several years was removed six months after Gioia took office, he said, adding, “He’s the only politician who’s really done anything.”