Surveillance cameras at the Countryside Shopping Centre were responsible for identifying the getaway vehicle which two robbers used following last week’s lunchtime heist at Cayman National Bank.

Police Commissioner David Baines told a crowd of some 50 people gathered Wednesday at a Chamber of Commerce meeting at the Marriott Beach Resort about what lead to the arrest of two suspects.

“The robbery that took place at the bank, there was a degree of information put forward by security guards…that they suspected this vehicle, a red coloured vehicle,” said. Mr. Baines. “We went back, took out all the CCTV coverage on Countryside and identified that a different vehicle was responsible.”

“That has triggered the line of enquiry that has identified the individuals we have in custody. Without that information, we would have gone purely off an erroneous report – given with the best of intentions – but wrong nonetheless. CCTV started to fill the gaps.”

The ‘caught on tape’ aspect doesn’t work in every case, but Mr. Baines said there have been instances in UK murder investigations he’s worked on where CCTV has placed a suspect at the scene of the crime when they initially denied being there.

“It gives you the ability to take to a court the type of evidence people can see…with their own eyes, where they may doubt the personal testimony of somebody,” he said.

Representatives from government’s Portfolio of Internal and External Affairs – which has administrative responsibility for law enforcement – said they were in the information-gathering stage of developing a national closed-circuit television system.

Currently, many businesses around the Islands use surveillance cameras on their own private properties. But those systems don’t communicate with each other, and there is no mechanism that exists to feed that information back to police stations in real time.

Portfolio Deputy Chief Officer Eric Bush told the Chamber audience Wednesday that there’s a substantial difference between a private business owner putting cameras on their property, and the government putting cameras on a public street.

“Under the new Constitution…everybody has the right to privacy,” Mr. Bush said. “We need to ensure that the legislation that’s in place now accurately regulates the use of public surveillance.”

Mr. Bush said officials in the legal services department have informed him that there would be about 15 local laws Cayman would need to either change or enact – including a Data Protection Law – before a national camera surveillance system could be implemented.

“Particularly where there is a bleed-over into private premises, the government needs to ensure that policies are in place so as not to infringe on anyone’s human rights,” he said.

The government is currently in discussions with a consultant to review strategies and designs for a national surveillance camera system, but Mr. Bush said they are merely at the discussion stage right now. He said cameras could be used for a number of measures including border security, traffic management and enforcement.

The cost of installing and maintaining such a system was unknown.

“What we look to achieve in this first stage is to create a design that would meet all of these objectives that would be scalable…so that we could bite them off and reasonable amounts,” Mr. Bush said.

The ability to leave out the eyewitness testimony often required in criminal court cases is a major selling point on CCTV for Commissioner Baines, who has previously lamented the fact that witnesses to crime are simply too afraid to tell what they know before a jury.

“There is no escape for anybody,” Mr. Baines told the Chamber crowd. “If you give evidence against people, they’ll go to prison, but you have to see their family in Foster’s (grocery store).”

Mr. Baines said the attorney general’s office has recently drafted legislation that would allow witnesses to testify anonymously through the use of voice alteration technology. That proposal has not yet reached the Cayman Islands Legislative Assembly.

He said witnesses are sometimes removed from the Cayman Islands and taken to secure locations particularly in serious violent crimes and gang-related incidents. However, that can often cost the Cayman Islands government tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in each case.