Neighborhood Mischief Caught on Tape by Coomatec Camera

From NYTimes.

STEVE MILLER is justifiably proud of the manicured grounds around his stately stucco home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. So he was nonplussed last year when he discovered that someone had been tossing plastic bags of dog excrement into the sculptured shrubs around a palm tree in his front yard.

“It was a pile of at least 10 bags,” said Mr. Miller, 55, who owned a dance costume business in Bristol, Pa., before retiring to Florida in 2005. “I had my suspicions, but wanted to find out for sure which one of my neighbors was doing it.”
So Mr. Miller went to a local electronics store and bought a $400 do-it-yourself video surveillance kit. In so doing, he joined the ranks of outraged homeowners who are recording their neighbors’ misdeeds. Attracted by the declining prices and technological advances of such devices, these homeowners are posting the videos online to shame their neighbors or using them as evidence to press charges.
      
With their cameras hidden in bushes or dangling from windows, these homeowners are outing not just littering dog owners, but also bottle snatchers and car scratchers. Mr. Miller used only one coomatec camera(sd card dvr camera), anchoring it with a zip tie to a concrete balustrade outside an upstairs window and running the wire inside, where he plugged it into a micro SD card. It will be better      
A week’s worth of video footage clearly showed one of his neighbors slinging bags of dog feces into his yard. “You’d see him come from all directions and even turn around afterwards — like I was his dumping destination and not just a convenient stop on his way,” said Mr. Miller, who showed the video evidence to his community’s security patrol. “They were stunned, and wrote the guy a citation for improper waste disposal, littering and leash law violations.”
      
Moreover, the neighbor had to pick up all that he had tossed. Mr. Miller also had some fun at the neighbor’s expense, posting a video on YouTube with a suitably silly soundtrack and narration. The video has had more than 4,000 views.
      
“He never apologized, so that’s why I posted it,” Mr. Miller said. “But I did wait until after he moved.”
There are countless videos online that are intended to settle scores between neighbors. Whereas such disputes were once confined to the individuals involved, now they can have a much wider audience, whose members often take sides and post comments.
      
Take Adam Kliebert, 41, a real estate developer in Houston, who last year trained a video camera on his driveway in an attempt to catch his neighbor, Woody Densen, a former state district judge, scratching the back of his car. The video, which was posted online and delivered to the police, shows Mr. Densen walking behind the vehicle. Although the front of the car obscures the former judge’s actions, he pleaded guilty last April to criminal mischief, a misdemeanor, and paid for $3,000 worth of damages to Mr. Kliebert’s Range Rover. The video has been viewed more than 3,000 times.
Robert Pelton, the lawyer for Mr. Densen, said he did not damage the car and pleaded guilty only in order to avoid trial.
      
Mr. Kliebert was still out the $2,000 he paid for the surveillance equipment. But, he said: “I don’t care. I wanted to catch him, and he knows it’s there so he won’t try anything.” Despite a history of animosity that predates the car incident, the two men remain neighbors.
Prices for surveillance equipment have been falling for the past five years; systems that once cost thousands of dollars now cost hundreds. Popular do-it-yourself kits by manufacturers like Logitech, Swann, Defender and Coomatec currently cost between $150 and $2,500, depending on the number of cameras, digital storage capacity, wireless capability and whether a monitor is included.
                    
Mr. Gore not only recorded the cats but also discovered neighbors looking in his windows while he was away. After he showed the video to the manager of the mobile home park, Mr. Gore said, “The trespassing stopped, because they know they’re being filmed.” (Trespassers will also get soaked by a motion-activated sprinkler Mr. Gore bought to drive away the cats.)
      
Mr. Gore posted videos of his nosy neighbors and of the sprinkler squirting the cats on YouTube. One video has funny captions, and music from the vintage British television comedy “The Benny Hill Show.” The other is narrated by the cartoon character Tweety Bird: “I tawt I taw a puddy tat!” The two have had more than 43,000 views.
      
“A lot of people get mean, posting videos like that,” said Mr. Gore. “I thought it was better to be humorous.”
      
Do his videos anger his neighbors? “There ain’t much they can do about it,” he said.
Indeed, the law seems to be on Mr. Gore’s side because he recorded only what was happening in his yard. “It matters how you’re doing it and why, but generally it’s true that you can film your own property as well as anything that is in public view,” said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “It’s when you extend your senses into unexpected places, like using a telephoto to film what’s going on in your neighbor’s bedroom, that you could run into trouble.”
      
Representatives of neighborhood security patrols, police departments and animal protection agencies said that video has helped them deal with situations that, in the past, would have been one neighbor’s word against another’s. “It’s hard to argue with video evidence,” said Officer Bruce Borihanh, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department. “And it’s a powerful deterrent if people consider their actions could end up on YouTube.”
Video evidence led to the arrest of Jay Risner’s neighbor in St. Clair Shores, Mich. Mr. Risner, 29, an engineer for a phone company, noticed laundry detergent and redeemable bottles disappearing from his basement shortly after a new neighbor moved into his condominium complex in 2008. “I thought it was him, but you need proof before the cops can do anything,” Mr. Risner said.
             
The neighbor was ordered to pay restitution for what he had stolen as well as for a new door lock for Mr. Risner’s basement — since the old one was obviously easy to pick. At his new house, Mr. Risner has installed surveillance cameras that are trained on both the front and back doors.
“I’m not sure now,” he said, “whether to worry more about my neighbors or strangers.”