I get the temptation to attribute the popularity of these systems to lazy police with nothing better to do, but from personal experience there’s more to it.

I live in a medium sized residential development about 15 minutes outside Austin. A few years ago we started getting multiple incidents per month of attempted car theft where the thieves would go driveway to driveway checking for unlocked doors. Sometimes the resident footage revealed the thieves were armed while doing so. In a couple of cases they did actually steal a car.

The sheriffs couldn’t really do much about it because a) it was happening to most of the neighborhoods around us, b) the timing was unpredictable, and c) the manpower required to camp out to attempt to catch these in progress would be pretty high.

Our neighborhood installed Flock cameras at the sole entrance in response to growing resident concerns. We also put in a strict policy around access control by non law enforcement. In the ~two years since they were installed, we’ve had two or three incidents total whereas immediately prior it was at least as many each month. And in those cases the sheriffs could easily figure out which vehicles had entered or left during that time. I continue to see stories of attempted car thefts from adjacent neighborhoods several times per month.

I totally get the privacy concerns around this and am inherently suspicious of any new surveillance. I also get the reflexive dismissal of their value. In this case it has been a clear win for our community through the obvious deterrent factor and the much higher likelihood of having evidence if anything does happen.

Our Flock cameras do not show on the map here, btw.