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

"Here's a problem child," Becker says. "Watch what he does."

The young man proceeds to climb the fence toward the apartments. Becker lays on the horn. The young man keeps climbing, unperturbed. Becker opens his car door part way, leans out and shouts, "You know you're not supposed to do that!"

"OK," the young man says politely, continuing to climb.

"Well, OK," Becker says, "but you're still doing it."

"Sir?" the young man asks, climbing.

"You're still doing it."

"Yes, sir," he says. "I intend to continue doing it."

"OK, I'll call 911 and tell them that we don't appreciate it."

"Yes, sir," the young man says, now over the top.

"Take care," Becker tells him, driving off.

All so civil! The problem here, it seems to me, is that the fence-climbing kid can't get out of Richland Park Estates and into his apartment complex except by climbing a fence. The streets of Richland Park are public streets—Dallas streets, like mine. But the effect of the cameras, the patrol and the fence is to convey to that kid that he is not allowed to be here. At all.

Later that week, I came back to Richland Park and knocked on doors. I found Mary Allen at home, with a somewhat less sanguine view of the crime situation than Becker or the people at Omni-Watch.

"We've had a lot of crime despite the cameras," she told me. "This house across the street for about nine months was a crack house. People went in and out of that house. The cameras didn't catch anybody. The reason we figured it out was because of the unsavory characters that kept going in and out, the prostitutes in their little skimpy outfits and so on."

She said the apartment complex behind her, the one the fence-climber was trying to enter, just on the other side of the alley, is a major drug-dealing center. "There was one day where they took a whole meth lab and dumped it in one of the neighbor's trash cans."

But she said her only wish for the cameras would be to have more—more and more—in order to survey what isn't already watched. I asked her about privacy.

"I have thought a lot about that," she said, "but I think I'd rather have safety right now."

Mott of Omni-Watch says the system works mainly as a deterrent, but he believes the deterrence only works if the system also catches people every once in a while.

"We have in my neighborhood caught and had arrested three different people now committing crimes, because of the cameras," he said. He believes that the word gets out on the street and criminals tend to stay away.

The City of Dallas is hoping Mott is right. It has installed 32 surveillance cameras downtown and 14 in the Jubilee Park neighborhood of South Dallas, all monitored by 911 operators. It's too soon to know what long-range impact those cameras will have on crime. We still don't have enough cops, and they can't all concentrate on camera calls.

The coda to all of this is that after I spend several weeks worrying about the poor kid who has to climb a fence, my son comes home from Austin, and his truck gets burglarized in front of my house. Again. For the third time. I'm so angry I'm right back where I was the last time this happened, fantasizing about hiding in a bush and blasting somebody to kingdom come.

These equations are difficult to solve—human life versus property, safety versus privacy. I just don't feel like getting on my liberal high-horse about the way anybody else tries to work it out. We are all laboring in the same vineyard, struggling to defend livable communities from the barbarians.

Richland Park is a little more North Dallas. They use cameras. We're more Third World in East Dallas. We use irate mobs. I'm on the side of anybody who doesn't give up.

I hate telling that kid with the backpack that he can't be where he wants to be. But I also understand how these cycles take on the aspect of war, and everybody's liberty suffers in war. My big idea is to hope for this current cycle to ebb. Always worked before.