Home Affairs Minister Nickolas DaCosta MP told Parliament on 5 October 2026 that Cabinet had approved CI$130,000 for cameras at eight East End sites, taken from the equity investment budget of the Ministry of Youth, Sports, Culture and Heritage. The minister responsible for that budget, Isaac Rankine MP, is the elected member for East End.

Asked by Kenneth Bryan MP, Deputy Leader of the Opposition and member for George Town Central, Mr DaCosta said gaps had also been identified in George Town, including the centre, and funding found. He gave no date.

What the cameras mean for drivers

The national CCTV system is, in practice, a road network. Its Cabinet-approved Code of Practice lists among its aims to "monitor road traffic circulation and improve road safety", and the network carries Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras that photograph each passing plate and log the camera, date and time to a database. For a driver on Queen's Highway or Sea View Road that means a record of where the vehicle was, searchable by police for stolen cars, hit-and-run inquiries and, through the electronic plate system, unlicensed or uninsured vehicles. The minister did not say how many of the 24 will read plates.

What the cameras do not do is issue tickets. Since 2018 the Traffic Act has made camera evidence admissible and presumed the registered owner liable unless they prove the vehicle was out of their hands, yet no speed or red-light camera has been installed. The National Security Council endorsed a National Roads Authority business case for LIDAR speed cameras on 25 February 2025. Speed cameras are separate devices, so the East End expansion changes nothing on speeding.

Motorcyclists are the exception the technology cannot reach. A plate reader needs a plate, and the unregistered bikes that have drawn repeated police seizure operations carry none.

Where the robberies have been

Central George Town has had a run of armed robberies this year. Police reports record a masked gunman at a Subway on Shedden Road on 28 February and at a Mary Street convenience store the next morning, an armed robbery at a North Church Street restaurant on 6 March, and a bank customer robbed at gunpoint in the Cayman National Bank car park on Elgin Avenue in daylight on 27 March, the robbers leaving by car. On 20 April a North Church Street jewellery store was robbed and the getaway vehicle chased through town. Several of these cases are before the courts.

All of those streets have been on the Cabinet-approved master camera list since 2011. The minister did not say whether the George Town gaps are cameras never installed or cameras that no longer work.

Emergency money for a planned expansion

The CI$130,000 was approved under the exceptional circumstance provisions of the Public Management and Finance Act, which allow unappropriated spending only to remedy the effects of an exceptional circumstance. Mr DaCosta told Parliament the East End scheme was a deliberate and strategic decision, that all eight sites had been assessed, and that the gap could not be deferred without consequence for public safety.

It is the second time in five months the clause has been used for cameras. On 1 May 2026 the same minister told Parliament that Cabinet had approved an exceptional circumstance allocation for 30 new cameras in Bodden Town and North Side, according to the government's published summary of that sitting.

The audit nobody has seen

After the February 2024 shooting at Ed Bush Stadium, the National Security Council requested an audit of the programme to assess its effectiveness. No outcome has been published. The Code of Practice requires camera numbers and evaluation findings to be published at least once a year; the Department of Public Safety Communications, which runs the network, puts it at approximately 400 cameras.