Montreal police adding security cameras to fight crime, worrying community groups

Cameras will be installed in four parks in Montreal and in other places, including Cabot Square, a common gathering place for Indigenous people experiencing homelessness.

Montreal police are planning to install nine more security cameras across the city in response to a rise in violent crime, but community groups are questioning whether the technology works to deter crime or is a waste of money.

With the addition of the nine cameras — costing up to $11,000 each — the police say they plan to operate a surveillance network of 42 cameras in the city by the end of the year. City police refused to be interviewed about the network, instead referring all questions to their website, which states that the locations of the cameras were chosen “following an analysis” of violent crime in the city.

The province says violent crime, especially gun-related crime, has risen in Montreal since 2016. But Université de Montréal criminology professor Rémi Boivin says he doesn’t know how the police could justify adding more surveillance cameras across the city.

“If the objective is to prevent crime, I would answer that, first of all, it does not work, and secondly, (the police) already know that,” Boivin said in an interview Monday.

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He was part of a research project that analyzed the first series of public surveillance cameras police installed in Montreal in 2010, and he said the results indicated the preventive impacts of cameras on violent crime were “inconclusive.”

“Crimes against someone are easily movable,” he said in an interview Monday. “If they don’t occur in a park where there’s a camera, will they happen in the next one where there’s no surveillance?”

Cameras will be installed in four parks across the city and in other locations, including downtown’s Cabot Square, a common gathering place for Indigenous people experiencing homelessness.