The new video surveillance cameras are part of what the city calls a three-phase plan to add more than 200 new security cameras.

JERSEY CITY, N.J. – City officials here are prepared to spend more than $608,000 to purchase more than five dozen new security cameras that would be placed in six city parks and in nine high-crime locations.

The decision comes as the city has faced months of criticism for the poor condition of its video surveillance system, NJ.com reports. City officials have conceded that the system is outdated and that at any given time a third or more of its 150 cameras may not be functioning.

In a statement, Mayor Steve Fulop said the current system is “quite simply … failing.” Some of the cameras were purchased as many as 15 years ago.

“We made a commitment to replace our city’s aging and inefficient CCTV camera system with one that will provide optimum coverage in key areas and we are doing that,” Fulop said. “This is another tool that will increase public safety, prevent crime and help our officers as they work to solve cases.”

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The new cameras are part of what the city calls a three-phase plan to add more than 200 new security cameras, NJ.com reports.

According to the website, the council is scheduled to vote on Dec. 21 for two contracts, both with Millennium Communications of East Hanover, N.J. The first, for $249,989, would add 26 cameras to five parks: Triangle, Vernator Watson, Muhammed Ali, Audubon, Arlington and Columbia. All are located in neighborhoods that struggle with crime.

The second contract, for $358,291, calls for 36 cameras to be placed at nine locations: five on Martin Luther King Drive (where it intersects with Woodlawn and Wilkinson avenues and Atlantic, Stegman and Wade streets); three on Ocean Avenue (at Woodlawn and Bayview avenues and Wegman Parkway) and at Rutgers and Chapel avenues.

The new video surveillance cameras will produce images with a higher resolution than the current cameras can, and some will cover a 360-degree field of vision, “thereby removing user error as a camera will never be facing the wrong way and removing the ability for criminals to move out of view,” the city said in a statement.

Residents have criticized city officials for the surveillance system during the year at town hall meetings. City officials have blamed their predecessors, saying the surveillance system was pieced together through various contracts, leading to three different sets of cameras each using a different technology. The new cameras will not have that problem, the city said.