KPRC Local 2 here in Houston fought to get records from the Metro system showing routine outages of security cameras at Metro's "park and ride" lots. KPRC investigative reporter Stephen Dean had a great piece on last night's 10 p.m. newscast:

HOUSTON -- Internal records detail a daily list of camera outages at METRO Park & Ride lots throughout the Houston area, Local 2 Investigates reported Monday.

An average of 20 reports of outages are sent in for repair each month, according to those documents that METRO Transit Authority officials tried to withhold. When Local 2 Investigates pushed for the release of those records, the Texas attorney general forced METRO to hand over the documents.

The security cameras have been the subject of some controversy, as auto break-ins at the park and ride lots got the press' attention earlier this year.

The piece included a clip of Metro's police chief telling Dean a few months ago that the camera outages weren't that frequent. But the records he obtained show that the failures are indeed frequent, and often include every camera in a given lot being off-line.

The records also suggested that broken cameras sometimes aren't repaired for a month to six weeks, though Metro challenged that assertion and told Dean that the records may be inaccurate.