Whilst tending to the morning YouTube sweep, I stumbled across surveillance-camera footage shot at a 7-Eleven at 9820 Walnut Street, taken just before the store was robbed by two men. The video was posted by the Dallas Police Department, and it marks the department's debut on the YouTubes. "We are experimenting with this," senior corporal Kevin Janse tells Unfair Park this morning.
Janse, a spokesperson for the department, says posting the video to the YouTubes will make it easier to get surveillance-cam footage to the local TV affiliates; no longer will the stations have to send a camera down to DPD HQ to shoot the video off a monitor. But it's also the moving-picture version of Bandit Tracker, where local and federal law-enforcement agencies recently began posting surveillance-cam photos taken during bank robberies. "The detectives say they get good leads when we put videos and stills out there," Janse says, "so we're trying to do that any way we can." --Robert Wilonsky