Neighborhood Mischief Caught on Tape

By KATE MURPHY
NYT

STEVE MILLER is justifiably proud of the manicured grounds around his stately stucco home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. So he was nonplussed last year when he discovered that someone had been tossing plastic bags of dog excrement into the sculptured shrubs around a palm tree in his front yard.

“It was a pile of at least 10 bags,” said Mr. Miller, 55, who owned a dance costume business in Bristol, Pa., before retiring to Florida in 2005. “I had my suspicions, but wanted to find out for sure which one of my neighbors was doing it.”

So Mr. Miller went to a local electronics store and bought a $400 do-it-yourself video surveillance kit. In so doing, he joined the ranks of outraged homeowners who are recording their neighbors’ misdeeds. Attracted by the declining prices and technological advances of such devices, these homeowners are posting the videos online to shame their neighbors or using them as evidence to press charges.

With their cameras hidden in bushes or dangling from windows, these homeowners are outing not just littering dog owners, but also bottle snatchers and car scratchers. Although Mr. Miller’s surveillance system came with two motion-activated cameras, he used only one of them, anchoring it with a zip tie to a concrete balustrade outside an upstairs window and running the wire inside, where he plugged it into a DVR.

(More here.)