In that time, owner Terry Khorramian and his wife have had front row seats as they've watched downtown build up around their restaurant bringing more people, more traffic and more crime.
And with all the development came the Innovative Response to Improve Safety — or IRIS — program, a system of surveillance cameras maintained by the Orlando Police Department.
The nearly 200 motion-censored cameras — mostly downtown, in Parramore, the International Drive tourist district and the MetroWest neighborhood — are always recording and are monitored by police almost 24 hours a day.
Khorramian, 65, welcomes the cameras.
"To me, I'm happy they have it," he said. "The amount of car accidents are lower. Nobody wants to pass the red light. If they were going to steal, they know they have cameras now, so they don't do it because they don't want to pay for it...
"It's very good."
Imperfect Tool
The first set of IRIS cameras came in 2007. A private $50,000 grant from Target Corp. along with a $20,000 grant from Darden Restaurants funded the first 19 cameras, mostly in the Parramore neighborhood.
From there, another grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency brought more cameras to Orange Avenue and International Drive and helped build the infrastructure that supports the current system.
The cameras became an integral part of OPD's investigative process, said Deputy Chief Robert Pigman.
When a crime is committed, officers at the scene communicate with the officers monitoring the cameras so the video of the incident will be saved indefinitely. The remaining video is generally kept for up to 30 days before it is purged.
"This is another tool in law enforcement that we can use that has fantastic evidentiary purposes," Pigman said. "It's a great tool to capture what really happens in any given incident. … You just can't beat pictures and video."
But the system is not perfect.
In July, five Orlando police officers fired 29 bullets at a man accused of attempting to run them over while ramming his way through downtown traffic to escape arrest. The chase spanned downtown Orlando with gunfire breaking out near the intersection of Amelia Street and Garland Avenue before the suspect was finally stopped near Colonial Drive and Orange Avenue.
But the IRIS camera above Amelia and Garland which should have captured at least a portion of the incident on video malfunctioned and nothing was recorded.
Then a month later it happened again.
In August, an innocent woman was killed by a stray bullet from an officer's gun. The bullet was meant for an armed man outside of the Vixen Bar downtown. Two downed IRIS cameras in the area failed to record that shooting.
A series of emails exchanged between police and Traffic Control Devices Inc., the Altamonte Springs company contracted to maintain and repair the cameras, showed that 30 to 79 cameras were out of order in the time between the two shootings.
"You just don't know what you're going to miss when that camera is down," Pigman said. "A classic example is the shooting that occurred downtown."
The problems cropped up when underground fiber optic cables that powered the cameras were damaged during the construction of the Dr. Phillips Center for Performing Arts and the Citrus Bowl last summer.
The way the cameras are interconnected only aggravated this issue, according to Frank Kemp, the human resources director for Traffic Control Devices, Inc.
"It's like Christmas lights," Kemp said. "When one camera would go down, a whole string of cameras would go down."
Then OPD would have to notify Traffic Control Devices and both parties would have to create a repair schedule. On average, the city spends between $36,000 and $60,000 annually to keep the cameras operational.
But unless a contractor noticed that the fiber optic cables were damaged and reported it or an officer assigned to monitor the cameras noticed that some frames were missing from view, no one was alerted of the problem and nothing was fixed.
Between the I-4 Ultimate project and the coming Orlando City Soccer stadium, there are still years of construction projects ahead which created more potential for widespread outages.
Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said the city recognized that problem and fixed it using a technology management system already used to monitor other equipment.
"Now we have technology that polls the network every half second and can detect when there is a problem," Dyer said. "It's now done automatically as opposed to manually."
Using that system, officers know right away when a camera is down and problems can be diagnosed and repaired as soon as they arise.
Future of IRIS
Despite the problems with the system, city officials say the cameras are effective.
"We can't have a police officer at every intersection every second," Dyer said. The IRIS cameras "give us additional eyes on the street."
The repairs to the fiber optic cables that were damaged last summer have brought periodic outages down to between 11 and 20 cameras at a time, Pigman said, adding that OPD is planning to expand the system.
The next wave of cameras to be installed are already in the works: eight in Parramore, 10 in MetroWest and 17 along Semoran Boulevard. Pigman said future expansion will come but OPD doesn't want to grow the system faster than their staffers can monitor it.
"There is no grandiose plan for immediate growth," Pigman said. "We want managed growth, slow and deliberate."
Once the new cameras are installed, the priority will be maintenance.
The IRIS cameras are "important because, to me, they prevent crime," OPD Chief John Mina said. "People notice the cameras and there will be a percentage of those people who won't commit crimes because they know they are going to be caught."
©2015 The Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, Fla.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
