How one Chattanooga man helped his neighborhood combat theft

On his morning runs, Matt Stevens often noticed broken windows throughout Highland Park.

He saw his neighbors report petty thefts and break-ins over and over again on social media. Eventually, someone broke into his truck. Then in March, after he’d live a couple of years in the neighborhood, someone rummaged through the family car while it was parked next to his house.

That did it.

Stevens went to Costco, found a great deal on a set of video cameras and put them up. Four days later, he caught images of a man walking the street, pulling on car doors and climbing into unlocked vehicles.

Stevens sent the video to Chattanooga police and began a new daily ritual: reviewing the night’s footage each morning and sending suspicious images to police.

For the first five months, his cameras caught between one and three incidents each month. Police upped patrols in the neighborhood and worked closely with Stevens and other neighbors. And then the street – at least the stretch within view of Stevens’ cameras – went quiet.

Stevens hasn’t seen another instance of suspicious activity since August.

It’s an extremely local, relatively short-term success, but police say security cameras, coupled with community engagement, can be powerful tools to reduce crime. The department is currently working to install 15 new surveillance cameras across the city.

The cameras will feed into the police department’s planned “Real Time Intelligence Center,” a centralized hub where police will be able to track and respond to incidents as they happen. The 15 new cameras, which should be up and running by April, will be in addition to more than 100 cameras installed in 2007 that also could feed into the system.

The locations of the new cameras will be determined by crime data, officer experience and community input, police said.

As helpful as security cameras can be, relationships with community members are even more important to effective crime fighting, Lt. Eddy Chamberlin said.

“I think the [personal] cameras are phenomenal,” he said. “Absolutely, they did solve some cases. But those cameras are useless unless you have someone operating them who will give the info to the police department.”

He credited the decline in crime on Stevens’ street both to security cameras and cooperation from residents. The neighbors were quick to report crimes, helpful when police asked for feedback or information. People in the area also took steps to become harder targets, Chamberlin said, by not leaving valuables in their vehicles.

“And that was a big component to this,” Chamberlin said. “I’ve worked with other neighborhoods where it took a long time for them to realize that as along as the opportunity and valuables are there, the thieves will continue to come there until it’s no longer an attractive location for them to go to.”

For Stevens, the goal is to continue to make his street – and eventually, the entire Highland Park neighborhood – unattractive to thieves. His camera footage already has led to at least one arrest: a teenage boy who was recorded going through Stevens’ truck in July.

Police worked with school resource officers to identify the teenager, who pleaded guilty.

Across the city, the number of reported thefts was about 12 percent lower in 2016 compared to 2015, records show. Between January and November 2016, 3,708 thefts were reported, compared to 4,212 in those months in 2015.

Thefts from vehicles dipped 5 percent – from 2,290 in the first 11 months of 2015 to 2,166 in 2016.

Stevens isn’t sure the four months of calm on his street will hold, but he’s still encouraged by the results he’s seen since mounting his cameras and becoming more involved with police officers.

“[It was] a concerted effort between me, our Neighborhood Watch and CPD to see if we could encourage these people to do the benefit and risk analysis and find out that the return on investment for doing petty theft on this street was not going to be in their favor,” Stevens said.

Contact staff writer Shelly Bradbury at 423-757-6525 or sbradbury@timesfreepress.com with tips or story ideas. Follow @ShellyBradbury.