I just received a report that car windows had been smashed in Heather Hills (11817 132^nd Ave. Ct. E. and 13117 116^th St. Ct. E.).  The vandalism took place on the night of 22-23 July.  One of the people reporting the vandalism said that she had noticed at least one other vehicle in the neighborhood with a tarp over the window.

I have written before about the need to be able to see events in every part of our Neighborhood.  The unfortunate fact is that when things happen in places not covered by one of our cameras, we struggle to find the vehicles/persons involved, if we can find them at all.  Several months ago one of the homes in the Neighborhood was broken into. The break-in was observed and using descriptions of the vehicle and the time the incident happened, we were able to pinpoint the vehicle and pass the information to the police.  Unfortunately, since we did not have CCTV coverage which could place the vehicle at the home which was broken into, that was all we could do.

Since we put up cameras several years ago I have been asked many times to look for cars or people because of incidents which happened in areas where I know our CCTV coverage is non-existent.  Much of the time the requester was unable to give me a reasonable time frame for the occurrence, and all I could do was plow through hours of pictures in the hopes that something would stand out.  Most of the times it did not. Below is part of an article which I shamelessly copied. It addresses combatting crime in real-time because of professional minute to minute monitoring of a CCTV network, but it is also applicable to us because we can keep images for several weeks (longer for our Neighborhood Camera System).  Therefore when something happens we can look back and check for any clues.

“There’s ample evidence that CCTVs combat more routine crime. According to a study by the Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, when surveillance networks are installed and competently manned by trained personnel, they reduce many types of criminal activity by a significant margin, and they do so cost-effectively. After cameras were installed in downtown Baltimore in 2005, the study says, violent crime fell by 23 percent and all crime fell by 25 percent. In one area of Chicago, crime fell by 38 percent after CCTVs were installed. The study showed a smaller impact in other places—in Washington, D.C., for instance, researchers found that a surveillance system had no discernable impact on crime. But the reason for D.C.’s surveillance failure won’t please civil libertarians: Researchers argued that the cameras likely didn’t work because their use was too tightly regulated as a result of privacy fears. After getting input from the ACLU, D.C. instituted rules that severely limit who can look at the cameras and whom they can follow. The rules also prevent operators from saving surveillance footage routinely. In practice, the regulations mean that few people are monitoring D.C.’s cameras and responding to crimes that are caught on tape. The report suggests that if the rules were relaxed, the cameras might prove far more effective.”

In New Orleans there is a network of privately owned CCTV cameras which are registered with the police. When crime happens, the police check their registration for cameras in that area and send out a request for pictures.  See:

http://www.wwltv.com/news/eyewitness/katiemoore/crimesurveillancealiveandwelldespitecitysdeadefforts-245454901.html .  If the people in our Neighborhood whose cameras show the exterior of their house would register with Dav Eide or me, we could probably increase the coverage of our Neighborhood quite a bit.

While I’m on the subject of cameras, let me make some suggestions.  If your CCTV system is over four years old, unless you bought a professional high definition system, it probably is time to think about replacing it. Look at your recordings, if you see only blurs where you can’t recognize people or vehicles, it is time to replace your system.  The clarity of the cameras and recorders available today are much better than they were several years ago.  If you do replace your aged system, let me hope that you decide to have a camera which looks out on any cars you park in your driveway, and another one which looks down the street. The cost for a municipality to place a camera on a pole is around $15,000 to $30,000, but it would cost only a couple of hundred dollars for an individual to add a camera to an existing set up.  It would be great if one day we have the ability to track a vehicle from the time it enters our Neighborhood until it reaches its destination.  That way if mischief happens, we can be on it as soon as it is reported.