New Orleans, La. - When detectives investigate a crime in the French Quarter, one of the first things they do is look up.
"Most of our crimes are caught on tape," says New Orleans Police Commander Jeff Walls. "Anything that occurs, most of them we can come back and find it."
Cameras were rolling at the corner of Bourbon Street and St. Louis last Halloween as someone killed 25-year old Albert Glover. That crime led the French Quarter Management District to form their own security task force.
The group came up with SafeCams8, a database of crime cameras across NOPD's 8th District, including the French Quarter and the Marigny.
"I have cameras on my property and when a crime occurs, they knock on my door and say can you look at your surveillance cameras and see if you captured anything that could be useful for them," says Bob Simms, chairman of the task force for the French Quarter Management District. "Well, I might not be in, I might be out somewhere."
The SafeCams8 program allows investigators to pull up information about nearby surveillance cameras on their laptops or iPads, complete with ways to contact the camera's owner.
Nearly 200 cameras are already in the database, and police know there are many more in the area.
In just the last week, cameras rolled as a man on a bike snatched a cell phone in the 500 block of Bourbon. And surveillance video from last month recorded the suspect in a Bourbon Street bar fight walking away from the scene.
Police and volunteers hope the SafeCams8 database will reduce the turnaround time between the crime and when the video is available to the public.
"When we started with this program, I sat down with the detectives and said what information do we have?" says Larry Lane, a volunteer with the program. "Let's start with that, and we had Post-It notes, we had things written on the back of envelopes, we had handwritten lists, we had a list that was two years old and half the people had moved or died so we consolidated all that information and we started with about half of the information that's in the system now."
Home and business owners with surveillance systems must register to be included in the database. That information can only be accessed by NOPD detectives so the cameras can keep rolling undetected.
To register for SafeCams8, go online to http://www.fqmd.org/safecams8-nopdfix.html.
Surveillance camera in the French Quarter
