Steve Miller is justifiably proud of the manicured grounds around his stately stucco home in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. 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 Miller, 55, who owned a dance costume business in Bristol, Pennsylvania, before retiring to Florida in 2005. “I had my suspicions, but wanted to find out for sure which one of my neighbours was doing it.”
So 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, attracted by the declining prices and technological advances of such devices, are recording their neighbours’ misdeeds to press charges or perhaps to shame them by posting the video online. 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. Although Miller’s surveillance system came with two motion-activated cameras, he only used one of them, 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 DVR.
A month’s worth of video footage clearly showed one of his neighbours slinging bags of dog faeces 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 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 neighbour had to pick up all that he had tossed. Miller also had some fun at the neighbour’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,” Miller said. “But I did wait until after he moved.”
There are countless videos online that are intended to settle scores between neighbours. 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.
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 Lorex currently cost between $150 and $2,500, depending on the number of cameras, digital storage capacity, wireless capability and whether a monitor is included.
Moreover, many of these systems can now transmit to smart phones, so that people can watch activity on their property remotely. There are also apps that alert homeowners when video equipment detects motion in a particular area, such as near a car or beneath a beloved palm tree. Executives at Swann, Lorex and other makers of do-it-yourself surveillance systems report that sales are now evenly split between businesses and residences. Five years ago, they said, only 20 percent of sales were to homeowners.
Another option for do-it-yourself surveillance is free software, like SupervisionCam, which will turn any computer’s webcam into a motion-activated video camera. It works by detecting the changes in pixilation that occur when something moves and alters the scene. Kenneth Gore, 43, an unemployed welder who lives in Pinellas Park, Florida, used the software to document a neighbour’s cats prowling and fouling the yard around his mobile home.
Gore not only recorded the cats but also discovered neighbours loitering in his yard and looking in his windows while he was away. After he showed the video to the manager of the mobile home park, Gore said, “The trespassing stopped, because they know they’re being filmed.” (Trespassers will also get soaked by a motion-activated sprinkler that Gore bought to drive away the cats.)
Gore posted videos of his nosy neighbours 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 Gore. “I thought it was better to be humorous.” Do his videos anger his neighbours? “There ain’t much they can do about it,” he said.
Indeed, the law seems to be on 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 neighbour’s bedroom, that you could run into trouble.”
Representatives of neighbourhood 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 neighbour in St. Clair Shores, Michigan. Risner, 29, an engineer for a phone company, noticed laundry detergent and redeemable bottles disappearing from his basement shortly after a new neighbour moved into his condominium complex in 2008. “I thought it was him, but you need proof before the cops can do anything,” Risner said.
Using a $400 wireless surveillance system, Risner set up a camera in the basement and got his proof. Within two days, he had video of his neighbour entering his basement and rooting around, which he posted online earlier this year, after both he and his neighbour had moved.
“The video doesn’t show him actually taking anything,” Risner said, “but it was enough for the police to arrest him for home invasion and take him to jail.”
The neighbour was ordered to pay restitution for what he had stolen as well as for a new door lock for Risner’s basement – since the old one was obviously easy to pick. At his new house, 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 neighbours or strangers.”
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