Will Kane
The motion-activated surveillance camera outside Jesper Jurcenoks’ home in the Oakland hills takes some 12,000 pictures a day.
Every car, motorcycle, delivery truck, police car, bicyclist, pedestrian and deer that enters his isolated street off Skyline Boulevard gets photographed. Four times a second. Day and night. When they arrive and when they leave, time-stamped and stored on a server for 60 days.
The two cameras, one at each entrance of Jurcenoks’ looping street, form a virtual wall around the neighborhood, he said.
For years, Oakland residents have built fences or installed security cameras on their homes because they were fed up with burglaries and auto break-ins. Some neighborhoods hired private security guards to patrol their streets. Now they’re becoming more aggressive in their efforts to fight back.
In growing numbers, residents are forming neighborhood groups and spending thousands of dollars on cameras that can monitor the perimeter of entire blocks.
They don’t merely want to protect their homes. They want to catch anyone intent on criminal behavior.
“We will not a let a criminal enter or leave our neighborhood undetected,” Jurcenoks said. “We’re not saying we can stop the crime. We want to make sure we have a photograph.”
Trying to avoid abuse
Seven areas across the city have signed up for a neighborhood-wide surveillance system, and dozens more are interested, said Jurcenoks, the founder of Neighborhood Guard, a nonprofit that helps owners set up and install such systems. He installed his neighborhood’s system in 2012, costing the neighborhood association $2,000 for each camera, a $1,500 one-time fee and $100 a year to continue using the service. He said the two cameras cover 88 homes. Smaller neighborhoods pay less money.
“The trick is that you’re not putting one on every house,” said Jurcenoks, who puts them at the street entrances to neighborhoods. Although no one in the neighborhoods has picked a fight about a lack of privacy, digital snooping or even the potential for neighborhood gossip, those using the security cameras say the issue is of constant concern, and they’re careful to avoid abuse.
“Most people are ambivalent” about the surveillance, said Jean Thompson, 51, whose Glenview neighborhood installed surveillance cameras a month ago. “But we’re so creeped out by what is going on (in terms of crime) that we feel we don’t have a choice.”
It is legal to photograph public spaces, like roads or intersections. But these images live on an online server accessible to anyone with the proper log-in, which means there is the potential for neighbors to see who visits a husband while his wife is away on vacation, or check who doesn’t clean up their dog doo.
Individual communities decide for themselves who has access to tens of thousands of pictures, how long they’re stored online, and under what circumstances they can be released to the police.