If you live in Gainesville, you should know that Big Brother is watching.

There are more than 300 cameras sprawled throughout the city at every traffic light intersection that can easily detect criminal activity just as easily as someone walking across the street. Some can even zoom in.

But the cameras are intended to make everyday life easier and less strenuous, despite popular belief.

Emmanuel Posadas, the city’s traffic operations manager, says he frequently gets asked by the public what each large, white camera does and receives endless records requests to see if footage from a specific time and day can be obtained.

It can't.

“We don’t record anything,” Posadas said. “They’re all live. They’ve been watching too much CSI.”

If the city were to constantly record the video, it would need to create a storage facility where the records could be kept. The data takes up 5 megabytes per second (mbps) and would need to be kept for at least 30 days, per state statute.

“It would be very expensive,” he said.

Although it's not recorded, people are watching around the clock. This helps the city and law enforcement monitor traffic, watch for accidents, alert the public to avoid certain intersections and respond to an emergency.

Posadas said Gainesville police and the state’s transportation department also have access to the systems. What those agencies choose to record, if anything, is up to them. It was unclear Thursday if either of those agencies records or stores video from the cameras.

There are three types of cameras used at traffic intersections throughout Gainesville, all which have been rolled out over the last two years. Each serves a different purpose.

The first is a dome camera, which looks like your typical security camera and costs between $3,000 and $4,000. These are positioned at every traffic light intersection in the city and give officials the ability to zoom in and around the area, Posadas said.

The next and most expensive surveillance tool used is an Iteris camera, which comes in packs of four for a whopping $25,000. The cameras detect vehicles at traffic lights. Posadas said these are easier to install than the underground lines that detect vehicles but often miss scooters and bikes.

“Every time a car drives (into the box), it tells the signal there's a car there waiting,” he said.

The third is a bell-shaped camera that offers the same service as the four Iteris models but has a 360-degree view. That one costs about $14,000.

“It’s more cost-efficient,” Posadas said. “But we can’t use it all the time.”

That’s because trees often obstruct the cameras' view.

Posadas estimates that approximately 95 percent of Alachua County’s traffic-light intersections have cameras.

None, however, are used to catch and ticket vehicles for running red lights.

Contact reporter Andrew Caplan at andrew.caplan@gvillesun.com