The 30 new police surveillance cameras for Northeast Baltimore that Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake mentioned yesterday in her State of the City address were first announced last June.

And city officials say they won’t be installed until, at best, the end of this July.

Still, residents in this crime-plagued part of the city don’t mind the one-year delivery, if it happens on time.

“We were quite pleased to hear it in the speech,” said Mark Washington executive director of Coldstream-Homestead-Montebello Association. “To tell you the truth, I thought it was something that was going to take longer.”

The use of video surveillance cameras to deter crime – and help the police make arrests – has been a hot-button topic in the city for years. Some studies have found them effective, while others, like this 2009 University of California Berkeley report, showed they have little effect on reducing crime.

The mayor, Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III and some community groups have been enthusiastic about the cameras, and the number of them installed in Baltimore has grown during Rawlings-Blake’s administration.

The city now has 545 police surveillance cameras, according to Sheryl Goldstein, director of the Mayor’s Office on Criminal Justice. (The additional cameras being installed in the Northeast part of town will bring the total to 575.)

“We think this monitoring really supplements the great work our police force does and helps to deter crime,” Goldstein said.

The camera installation project is taking place now, she said. “The first phase will be to install cameras on North Avenue, second phase is Harford Road and third phase is Belair Road,” she said.

The Belair-Edison and Coldstream-Homestead-Montebello neighborhoods were chosen in the wake of a crime spike there last year. As homicide numbers were ebbing across the city, those areas were beset by a wave of shootings and homicides, as well as non-violent crime.

“This new camera project will greatly assist our officers in the Northeast with more eyes on the street,” Rawlings-Blake said, in her remarks delivered before the City Council, “freeing-up our patrol officers to cover more ground faster.”

Irony Department

There was, though, some awkward timing to the mayor’s discussion of surveillance cameras in her speech yesterday. The Baltimore Police Department had been making headlines over the past week for its apparent hostility toward citizens who turn their cameras on the police.

“More of the ‘we can watch you, but you can’t watch us’ rhetoric going on here,” said Scott Cover in an email to The Brew.

Cover is the Federal Hill resident who was threatened with arrest by city police officers last Saturday morning when he attempted, with his cell phone, to film the arrest scene he encountered outside a bar.

Yesterday, a U.S District Court judge refused to grant the police union’s motion to throw out a civil suit filed by a man whose phone was seized when he attempted to record police arresting a woman during the 2010 Preakness.

Getting to Sustainable

Goldstein noted that the camera project for Northeast is fully covered by federal funds. The city entered a competitively bid $1.2 million contract to complete it, she said.

But with the city bearing the cost of maintaining its surveillance cameras – the average maintenance cost per camera is $1,873 a year – it remains a pricey program.

“We have to come up with a strategy that is sustainable, Goldstein said. “We can’t have one of these things on every corner.”

Washington, of Coldstream-Homestead-Montebello, also talked about the limitations of the surveillance cameras, including his concern about “the Big Brother aspect.”

“But there’s no question that technology and real-time policing are an effective tool to deter crime,” Washington said, citing the recent success of a single camera his association purchased with a grant and installed at a local trouble spot.

Asked exactly how the camera worked to stop crime in his community, he said, “It probably just shifted it to someplace else.”