St. Lucie County - Monday February 13, 2023: The St. County Sheriff’s Office has proposed a pilot program to place surveillance and license tag reading cameras in some County parks, and other public venues.
St. Lucie County Chief Deputy Brian Hester presented the plan to the St. Lucie County Commissioners last week. The proposal follows the still unsolved shooting of 8 people at Ellis Park on MLK Day, during which one person was killed.
No arrests have been made in that case yet and Chief Deputy Sheriff Hester acknowledged that they're having a tough time finding witnesses. He said if they'd had cameras in Ellis Park that Day, the case could well have been solved already.
“Even though there were a thousand plus people there, there are not a lot of eyewitnesses that are giving us information or will testify in court," said Hester. "If we would have had technology in place, probably everybody involved would already be sitting at Rock Road, we wouldn’t haven’t to rely on the eyewitnesses.”
The pilot proposal calls for installing the cameras in at least 5 locations, including Ellis Park in Port Pierce, Pepper Park, Longwood Regional Park, the Stan Blum Boat Ramp, and Lawnwood Stadium.
“We’re talking about 2-types of cameras," said the Chief Deputy. "The first is an automated license plate reader that captures searchable images of vehicles and license plates, and they’re compared to hot lists or hot plates. When a match is found, an alert is generated. Surveillance cameras, these are cameras that can be mounted to existing structures, there’s covert, overt, depending upon how great of a camera we want, what type of range we want.”
To install the cameras in the 5 initial locations would cost $125-thousand with a recurring cost of$15-thousand annually. The money would come from the court fees paid into the County’s Crime Prevention.
“So, what we can essentially do throughout the county is get this to where you can’t come in and out of Country without passing one of these cameras. This is how we stop the burglaries from coming up down south. We could deter, prevent a lot of crime based on these, and we could also solve a lot of crime.”
The Commissioners responded favorably to the presentation and will act on it at a later time.