Winnipeg pools eyeball surveillance cameras

Winnipeg mayinstall surveillance cameras at pools to deter sexual predators.

The city's community services department has asked city councillors to consider spending $333,000 on closed-circuitcameras to "deal with potential incidents of child exploitation and to deter criminal behaviour" at aquatic facilities.

"The upgrades will introduce modern, cutting-edge surveillance tools directly in aquatic facilities, providing highly-detailed camera imaging combined with a broad inter-facility camera distribution network that will allow for the surveillance of high-traffic areas within each facility in order to identify individuals engaged in unusual behaviour," states a requestthat comes before council's innovation committee on Tuesday.

• City modernizing efforts to combat child sexual abuse at public facilities

The city has been working with the Canadian Centre for Child Protection to develop a new program aimed at combating childsexual abuse.It has resulted in risk assessments of city facilities, new protocols for reporting incidents of suspected childsexual abuse and modernizedstaff training that will start at city pools and aquatic centres.