Sessions Court: CCTV crashed by lawyers’ chambers ‘piggybacking’ on court UPS

Camera reinstalled at Baba Ground gate with power lead kept out of reach.

LAHORE:

Security officials have re-installed a video camera at the Sessions Court gate, hoping that this time lawyers won’t so easily be able to steal electricity from it and crash the UPS on which the court complex’s entire security monitoring system depends.

The wire to the camera has been cased in plastic piping and runs to the gate from the roof of the sessions judge’s building so it can’t easily be reached, said Sessions Court Superintendent Muhammad Arif Chaudhry.

Until a couple of months ago, the wire supplying power to the camera at the gate on the Baba Ground side of the building ran at eye-level along a short boundary wall, with several lawyers’ chambers close by. These chambers tampered with the wire and made illegal connections to it so they could run their fans on the UPS during power outages.

This continued for a few weeks, until the UPS could no longer support the load. The cameras were switched to run directly on power from the mains, but they could not record anything during power outages.

Seven cameras could not record anything, it was then discovered, because their DVR recorders were also defective.

On the instructions of then Sessions Judge Abdul Waheed Khan, court staff investigated and discovered the illegal connections running into the lawyers’ chambers. They concluded that this had caused the UPS to overload and damaged the DVR recorders.

The next day a new UPS and DVRs were brought in, but the judge ordered the camera removed from the gate so the lawyers couldn’t crash the system again, court staff told The Express Tribune.  The lawyers were also warned to behave.

On May 28, when a gunman shot and killed two brothers in a courtroom in the complex during a murder trial, the camera on the gate was not in place. After the killing, extra security measures were put in place including the raising of the boundary wall.

Now, the camera has been re-installed, its lead running from the roof of the sessions judge’s building to the additional district and sessions judges’ building, from where it runs down to the gate along the high wall.

There are 59 CCTV cameras installed at the complex in courtrooms, parking stands, corridors and other places.

Footage from these cameras is monitored on four LCD screens in a control room in the sessions judge’s building.

The tiny control room does not have adequate ventilation, and during hot summer days the system often gets overheated and the video feed freezes, during which time nothing can be recorded.

Concerns about security measures at the city’s courts have heightened after several violent incidents during the last month.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 30^th, 2011.