Smile! If you go to a Columbus park you are likely on surveillance cameras

You better fix your hair and smile the next time you go into a Columbus city park or recreation center.

You might just be on camera.

The city is completing a $233,000 project to put surveillance cameras in 15 city parks, said Parks and Recreation Director Holli Browder. City officials began installing the cameras in June 2016 and should be completed by the middle of the summer, depending on weather and other contributing factors.

“We really are working to get them into different facilities,” Browder said on Friday. “We are not finished yet.”

There are a couple of reasons to put the cameras in: safety for those who use the facility and to assist city officials if something goes wrong.

Turn the clock back to late March 2014. It would have been great to have cameras in Shirley Winston Park at 5025 Steam Mill Road. During that time, someone — or more likely someones — stole the bleachers on the football field.

Think about that. They disassembled, dismounted and stole three sets on aluminum bleachers. Pretty bold, huh?

If they tried to do that now, it would be a much more difficult caper to pull off.

“We would definitely have more leads,” Browder said. “I am sure they had a truck or vehicles. We would have been able to turn that information over to police. It would have possibly given them a suspect or more to go on.”

Shirley Winston is one of the parks where the cameras already have been installed. Browder is reluctant to go through a complete list of where the cameras have been installed and where they will be installed.

Columbus Police Maj. J.D. Hawk said the cameras in the city parks will be helpful to law enforcement.

“We always look for cameras when we are investigating crimes,” Hawk said on Friday. “They can prove to be valuable in solving crimes.”

Police would have had a completely different starting point for the investigation of the June 15 2016 shooting death of Demonde Dicks near the basketball court at Double Churches Park if there had been cameras.

Cameras change the game.

Some will argue that there should not be surveillance cameras in city parks. Look around you now when you walk through a neighborhood, parking lot, downtown Columbus. Look close. There are cameras everywhere if you are paying attention.

They are on private property and public property. That’s just a way of life these days. And the bet here is there will be more cameras in the future.

“There are clearly health and security reasons to install the cameras,” Mayor Teresa Tomlinson said of the ones in city parks and recreation centers. “It is part of the security plan.”

Though there will be cameras in the majority of the city parks, they will not be in all of them to begin with. The initial phase does not include three of the city’s larger parks, Lakebottom Park, Flat Rock Park or the Chattahoochee RiverWalk from Lake Oliver Marina to Oxbow Meadows.

One of the reasons is the way the system, being installed by Adapt to Solve out of LaGrange, Ga., will be monitored, Browder said. The cameras will be monitored at each park in an office or main building, and there will be a central monitoring location.

Several years ago, the city got a $900,000 estimate to install cameras the length of the riverwalk. That was cost prohibitive, Tomlinson said.

“That came with some sticker shock,” Tomlinson said. “We are now looking at some alternatives, a way to cut the cost and figure something out.”

Browder is working on that.

“Georgia Power has poles the length of the riverwalk,” Browder said. “There is a possibility we could do something with Georgia Power to lower the cost.”

This story was originally published March 17, 2017 at 6:36 PM with the headline "Smile! If you go to a Columbus park you are likely on surveillance cameras."