On Jan. 21, the Golden Transcript published a story about the city of Golden finalizing a contract to install a camera system along Clear Creek. The city’s Chief and Innovation and Technological Officer, Jiles McCoy, has since clarified certain details related to that purchase.

In a recent email to the Golden Transcript, McCoy said that the “50 existing watchdog cameras” mentioned in a recent contract agreement with Fire Team Security, referring to existing cameras at city facilities, including city hall, the Golden Community Center and Fossil Trace golf course.

Fire Team Security’s new contract was to install new cameras along the Clear Creek corridor, and provide the back-end system to help monitor them, as well as the 50 existing cameras.

“This is a cost savings measure so that we don’t have to support two distinct camera systems in the long run,” McCoy said via email.

The new camera system will be the first cameras along Clear Creek.

McCoy also said the city will integrate metric solutions with the camera system.

“Cameras can be used as devices that simply transmit video,” said McCoy. “But they can also be used as sensors. What I mean by that is the video they collect can be interpreted by a computer to create data.”

The data that can be extracted is “pretty much anything a person might be able to identify if they watched the video,” McCoy said. That includes information about weather conditions, how many cars are parked, how many people are walking in view of the camera and conditions of the creek, including its water level.

“Each department will need to identify which kinds of data they would like before we can embark on this kind of endeavor, and policy and guidance needs to be crafted and implemented by the city and council as well,” McCoy said.

McCoy also said the Golden city manager is working to put together a group that will define policy around the city’s cameras and their use. However, he said one thing that is for sure is that the city will not be using the cameras for facial recognition.

“The city doesn’t own any such technology and this wasn’t part of the creek camera effort,” he said.