Are Surveillance Cameras the Answer to Rising East Dallas Crime Rates?

All of the unmistakable and depressing signs are gathering over my neck of the woods in Old East Dallas. We seem to be in for another spike in crime, and I'm wondering again what I can do about it.

I hate this stuff.

Word of a scary attack flashes up and down the block like lightning—back door kicked in, mother and nanny racing from house, babe in arms. The incident winds up in a typical East Dallas Keystone cops scenario, with a posse of pissed-off mothers and non-English-speaking construction workers all chasing the bad guy together.

He escapes, but the angry mob gets back the stolen stuff.

A few days later, one of the same mothers confronts another bad guy trundling an air-conditioning compressor out of an alley on a two-wheel dolly. He flees too, but Annie Oakley gets the compressor back.

Crime comes and goes like weather. If you have been through it before, you already know how difficult the calculation is. So you shoot a guy to save an iPod? Does that equation really balance out?

But to do nothing? No way. We have achieved a lot of success in these inner-city neighborhoods by physically running off crime—just like those mothers and construction workers did. Word gets around. Those people are crazy over there.

We could probably be more sophisticated about it in my area. Technology offers interesting potential, especially in the area of video monitoring. Richland Park Estates is an area in North Dallas that got national attention two years ago when it became one of the first middle-class neighborhoods in the country to subject itself to 24-hour video surveillance. I drove through there a few weeks ago to see how they were doing.

It's a small subdivision, about two and a half square miles, a block north of the LBJ Expressway, near Richland College. The houses are one-story frame construction on slabs, about 2,500 square feet in area, worth from $175,000 to $200,000, built in 1978 and '79.

The neighborhood fronts Audelia Road, a major urban thoroughfare, and is walled at the back by railroad tracks on a high berm. To the north and south are apartment complexes.

As I turn off Audelia, there is an immediate, enveloping sense of cloistered separation. The air is still, lawns trimmed neatly, houses well-tended. An outwardly cheerful sign greets me: "SMILE! This entire neighborhood is under 24-hour recorded video surveillance. Richland Park Estates Crime Watch." The same message is repeated in Spanish just below, but in harsher terms and without the "smile."

I look around for cameras, of course, but they are concealed. Eventually I find my way to the meticulously kept home of Dick Becker, former president of the homeowner's association, who shows me the books he keeps on neighborhood crime.

Using data from the police department, Becker has built Excel files showing crime within Richland Park dropping from high rates to almost zero since the cameras were installed two years ago.

"To give you some idea," Becker says, "just in our homeowner's association area in the last 100 weeks there have been 28 incidents. In the previous 12 weeks before cameras, we had 27 incidents."

Hmm. Not too shabby.

Becker tells me, however, that the cameras alone are not enough. "You have to have a good crime watch group, which we have here."

The cameras are monitored by homeowner's association volunteers who have been trained and vetted through the Dallas Police Department's crime watch program. When they see something suspicious, they jump in cars and eyeball the situation. Then they may call the cops.

Becker says the neighborhood also has some unique physical advantages. "We only have three driving entrances."

Of 143 households, 100 to 110 participate in the neighborhood association in a typical year. Dues are $100 a year. The association levied a special assessment of $50 to pay for concealed cameras at all of the entrances and along all of the peripheral alleys. Becker says 114 households contributed. "A lot of people gave a lot more than $50."

The system itself is the brainchild of Butch Davis of Omni-Watch Security Systems of Dallas. Approached by Richland Park residents, Davis cobbled together elements of commonly available surveillance equipment and household Internet systems with an ingenious compression algorithm of his own.

Collaborating with Bill Mott, a Richland Park resident who has since gone to work for him, Davis created a network that can be monitored by volunteers from their home computers.

From what I saw, it works like a charm and doesn't crash anybody's Internet connection.

Richland Park has also designed into the system a measure of privacy: The cameras look into public areas only. They cannot be turned or panned to peer into windows—a restriction the neighborhood placed on itself to allay concerns about invasion of privacy.