Our Very Own Security Surveillance Camera!

Another honor has been bestowed on our little neck of the ‘hood: The 400 block of O Street has been selected to get one of the first four neighborhood surveillance cameras to be installed by the MPD. Hey guys, we made the Top Four!

According to the WaPo, the “cameras will roll 24 hours a day, but will not be monitored live.” Also, there will be helpful signs on the cameras “to alert people to their presence.”

The site was chosen allegedly because “the 400 block of O Street has problems with drug dealing.”

This makes me wonder exactly where the camera will be placed. That block of the street itself is not an obvious drug market. We walk our dogs there frequently and have never seen anything that looks like drug dealing. The Bundy School has a constant contract security guard presence that normally is out in front during good weather and presumably would see that kind of stuff going down. The Bundy school field is a popular site for Latino soccer games and an impromptu dog park, but the activities I’ve observed there always looked pretty innocent.

It could be in the park at O and New Jersey Avenue (next to the fire station), which is a hang-out for homeless and supposedly a place where drugs are sold. But the police say they clear it out at dark and, to my knowledge, it hasn’t been a recent site of violence like other locations in the area.

The other likely spot would be the interior courtyard of the 8A coop residences between N and O in that block, where someone was shot just a few days ago. This is reputed to be home turf for the 5th and O crew.

Hmmm. If everyone knows exactly where the cameras are, then why wouldn’t they just go do whatever they are going to do someplace the cameras can’t see? (Just like those speed cameras before you go into the 3rd Street tunnel where everyone slows down for a few hundred yards and then speeds up as soon as they’re out of range.) Also, if the cameras aren’t monitored, then they’re useless for stopping anyone in the act, though I guess they might help make a case after the fact. Well, I welcome any measure that reduces crime in the area, but have to wonder how much this will help.