Although plans to install surveillance cameras in the Scheumann Stadium parking lot fell through the cracks last year, Ball State University officials said they might be willing to reconsider the idea.
The cameras are not designed to prevent incidences such as the attempted abduction Thursday night at the stadium, Director of Public Safety Gene Burton said.
Student Government Association members discussed at their Wednesday meeting how security cameras could help protect students in the parking lots. SGA and University Senate passed legislation in 2005 supporting installation of cameras. The Student Senate legislation asked Ball State to put cameras in both stadium parking lots and the H2 parking lot near Johnson Complex to combat the frequent automobile break-ins and theft.
Burton said because the surveillance cameras' original intent was to solve a theft problem, they probably wouldn't have protected a student. The feed was never intended to be actively monitored by a person, he said, and would not trigger a police officer to go to an incident. The cameras would have recorded a general picture of the parking lot, without situational zoom capabilities, Burton said.
"It wouldn't be a deterrent," he said. "In most cases, we wouldn't be able to identify someone."
Randy Howard, assistant vice president of the Finance Office, said the Finance Office would be happy to review plans for any type of security camera. The main concern is the how much the project will cost and where the money will come from, he said, neither of which can be determined until a proposal is submitted and the Finance Office receives bids from security companies, Howard said.
"I don't know why it wasn't funded," Kevin Kenyon, associate vice president of Facilities, Planning and Management, said. "I believe it would have been paid for out of parking fees for maintenance, enforcement and all that."
Burton said losing the project wasn't any one person's fault. The initial bid for the cost of the surveillance cameras was accepted, but the project somehow fell through the cracks during the review process, he said.
The university is concerned about the safety and security of its students, he said, and would be interested in reviewing the proposal for future projects.
Howard said so far, nothing new about surveillance cameras has been submitted to the Finance Office. Howard, who was not at Ball State while the initial bids for the cameras were placed, said he thought the project ran into problems when its objectives started to change.
"The idea morphed into the feed being monitored by someone watching the cameras live," he said.
Parking Services should pay for the cameras if they are for the protection of parked cars, Howard said. For general campus safety, money should be taken out of Public Safety's budget, he said.
Ball State would make sure to find a way of paying for the project, he said, if university and outside public safety experts or officials highly recommended cameras be installed.
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