Residents’ Video May Play Role in Murder Case

On a quiet cul-de-sac called Black Branch Court, the most dutiful guardian of neighborhood peace never sleeps, never eats and has three eyes.

With unblinking reliability, a video surveillance system installed by a Neighborhood Watch group in this middle-class tract on Sacramento’s southern edge has recorded events round-the-clock for a half-dozen years. Mostly, it has been the routine stuff of suburbia--a hit-and-run fender-bender, teenage toilet-papering raids and the like.

But one foggy night in January, the trio of cameras captured the blurry image police believe is the 21-year-old man suspected of murdering an elderly neighborhood woman and raping her granddaughter.

While it remains to be seen what role the grainy footage will play in prosecution, the case highlights the further escalation of video surveillance in a society increasingly accustomed to being under scrutiny in public places, from ATM machines to freeway offramps.

The cameras of Black Branch Court didn’t stop the murder, but neighbors believe they have helped keep a lid on crime in their tidy little cul-de-sac.

“We’ve been pretty much crime-free for the past six years,” said Ken Knox, who came up with the idea. “It’s been much worse on surrounding streets. They’ve had drive-by shootings and burglaries. We’ve had none of that.”

His neighbor two doors down, Ginger Vasquez, finds comfort in the system. “If nothing else,” she said, “it makes me feel better, a little safer.”

Surveillance systems are nothing new to private homeowners. Condo associations have been using them for years, and cameras are de rigueur for gated communities from Brentwood to Bethesda, Md.

But experts say few Neighborhood Watch groups have pulled together to install video cameras to keep a lookout for bad guys. Privacy advocates rue the practice.

“I haven’t heard much about neighborhood groups installing them, though I’m not surprised by it,” said Robert Ellis Smith, publisher of Privacy Journal, which reports on the impact of new technology on individual rights. “People justify it in the name of more secure neighborhoods, but it can evolve into a frivolous, noisy activity. I just don’t think that’s the kind of society we want to live in.”

In the six years the cameras have been rolling on Black Branch Court, they have faded into the backdrop. On occasion, parents would ask to replay a tape to determine the origin of some preteen tiff, but otherwise people mostly forgot the surveillance system was even there.

Except on Jan. 5.

Neighbors awakened that morning to find sheriff’s deputies swarming their street. An 81-year-old resident had been murdered, and her granddaughter, 23, raped for three hours before the masked intruder finally fled.

Knox told a deputy about the neighborhood surveillance system. “You have what?” was the response. He led the officer into his garage, where the videotape machine rests beside the electric hedge trimmer and a paint ladder. The deputy hit the eject button and grabbed the tape.

Sacramento sheriff’s Sgt. Jim Cooper said the picture quality of the video, which has not been made public, was basically “crummy.” But it may prove useful in court by establishing that a suspect was entering the house at the time the murder and rape occurred.

The surveillance system originally was installed with an eye toward solving misdemeanors, not murder. Six years ago, the opening of a new high school was creating nuisance problems, from squealing tires to teenagers switching off power to homes as a prank.

Neighbors decided that a surveillance system seemed a good remedy. Installation quotes from private firms proved too pricey, so they gave up on the idea. One day, however, Knox ran across an off-the-shelf system available at a discount department store. For $2,400, split among the 10 homeowners, they got three cameras, a video recorder and monitor. The system was installed in four hours, with cameras mounted under the eves of houses at the end of the court to get the best view.

It quickly paid dividends. In one case, a drunk partygoer from outside the neighborhood bumped into a homeowner’s car parked in the street and was caught on camera. The man refused to pay for the damage. Then Knox showed him the video. “He reached for his wallet and paid for it right on the spot.”

But there have been some glitches. A few years after the system was installed, a pair of men in a car grabbed a $500 mountain bike from an open garage. The cameras failed to catch a license plate. Knox ended up tinkering with the system, installing a close-up lens that generally catches the license as a car swings around the end of the court.

Only a few other groups around the country have gone as far to keep an eye on their neighborhoods. In Portsmouth, Va., a crime watch group has four video cameras pointed out homeowners’ windows. At a fashionable 450-home enclave in LaPlace, La., 25 miles west of New Orleans, the murder of an elderly resident prompted neighbors to install a camera that catches the license plates of anyone driving on the one access road.

“We had the one murder and a few burglaries before this,” said Earl Parr, the neighborhood’s crime watch coordinator. “That stuff has just stopped.”

In Los Angeles, law enforcement authorities are unaware of any Neighborhood Watch groups that have installed a surveillance system. Mostly, police say, crime-prevention advocates in the Southland have resorted to “video vigilantism,” using camcorders to document problems such as prostitution or drug dealing.

Some crime experts worry that the potential for abuse is too great to justify video surveillance anywhere but the most crime-infested neighborhoods.

“Those sorts of recordings can be used for inappropriate ends, or to embarrass individuals,” said Christopher Slobogin, a University of Florida criminal law professor. “It could range from the person having an affair on the sly to someone picking their nose out on the street who would just as soon not have that recorded for posterity.”

Slobogin also worries that cameras, which can be outfitted with a capability to swivel and zoom, could be used to surreptitiously peek in a neighbor’s bedroom. “It’s an insult to privacy,” he said. “Who is going to guarantee the cameras are only pointed at public areas?”

If neighbors have one regret, it’s that they didn’t press harder to have signs warning of the surveillance. Knox originally put a placard on a cluster of mailboxes, but the post office insisted it come down.

In the aftermath of the murder, the homeowners asked the county to put a permanent sign on a light pole. It went in a few weeks ago, right above the standard Neighborhood Watch placard.

“We really, truly feel that if signs had been posted, that murder wouldn’t have happened,” Knox said. “But we’ll never know. We could probably put a gate and an armed guard at our entrance and something could still slip through the cracks.”