Retailer Target Fights Crime in DC
Reported and produced by Lisa Raffensperger
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D.C. welcomed its first Target store last month, in the northwest neighborhood of Columbia Heights. On a weekday afternoon, the area is bustling with people, cars, and cops — a reminder that this neighborhood falls in D.C.’s highest-crime district.
But there are other eyes on these streets as well. Just down the street from the Target store there’s a surveillance camera, a sight that will become more common now that Target has moved to town. D.C. has become Target’s newest Safe City, joining the ranks of fifteen other Safe Cities nationwide. The central feature of Safe City is installing surveillance cameras in crime-ridden areas. Which means D.C. will be seeing a lot more of these cameras in the years ahead.
Jerald Bryant, who works with Target’s Asset Protections, says right now the project is still being planned.
“Currently they’re defining the scope, meaning where they would like to install cameras, the costs associated with that,” Bryant explains. “Right now we’re not only looking at Columbia Heights but throughout the metropolitan area. And that’s part of the scope work that’s being done, is what areas are most critical, if not even the whole entire city.”
Target has recently given the police a grant to cover part of the costs of the 50 cameras the department plans to add. Joshua Ederheimer, Assistant Chief of the Metropolitan Police Department, says cameras already have helped reduce crime in D.C.
“We have a network of cameras in the city right now,” Ederheimer says. “But we’re unable to meet the needs of the community because of budgetary restraints.”
He says residents of D.C. want more cameras. Take longtime Columbia Heights resident Laura Coonya, for example.
“I love the cameras; I think they need more. I think they oughta have them on every corner, all over D.C., and pointing in every single direction,” she says passionately.
Do Cameras Work?
However, not everyone shares her enthusiasm for cameras.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says there hasn’t been strong proof that the cameras already installed in DC are effective.
“I think at this point, most of the experts would say, the results are mixed,” Rotenberg says.
He says there haven’t been significant improvements in neighborhoods with cameras versus neighborhoods without. And a camera in one area may just move crime a few blocks away.
Rotenberg says law enforcement needs all the help it can get. But money spent on cameras may be better spent on good old fashioned policing.
“Cameras are typically useful after the fact, to try to determine how a crime might have occurred, but in terms of preventing a crime, sometimes it’s better to have an officer or patrol car,” Rotenberg says.
Safe City Success
In Flint Township, Michigan, Target helped fund 20 street surveillance cameras. Lieutenant James Iacovacci oversees the Safe City program there.
He admits that it’s hard to measure exactly what the cameras have done. But he’s sure that Safe City has made Flint Township safer.
“The reduction of crime in Flint Township we measure — like larceny from autos, which is one of the biggest crimes in Flint Township — we have definitely seen an overwhelming decrease in those larcenies because of the Safe City program,” Iacovacci says.
He says Safe City has been so successful that neighboring communities want to start the program too.
Feeling Safer
Here in D.C., Target representatives and police are still planning how Safe City will look. Plans for where cameras will go will be finalized later this year. In addition to cameras, the program might provide things like laptops, motorized scooters, and radios to police. Target’s forensics lab in Minneapolis has also offered to help analyze video from the D.C. cameras.
All this technology is worth it, says Jerald Bryant from Target, if it makes people feel safer.
“It’s something that’s not really measurable, it’s not gonna come up in statistics, where someone wasn’t robbed, someone wasn’t raped. It’s a feeling — it has to do with this person feeling safe and this person feeling like they’re okay,” he says.
Columbia Heights resident Laura Coonya says she wishes she had been that one person recently — but her motivation is less warm and fuzzy.
“I got my car broken into about a year and a half ago.” But, she says, with more cameras: “the jerk woulda been nabbed.”
Tags: business, DC, lisa raffensperger, science desk, security
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