On Dave Farber's IP mailing list, Greg Brooks wrote about a suburban mom who used grocery store surveillance video tapes to nab some kids who toilet papered her house:
There's an interesting piece in the Riverside (CA) Press-Enterprise about
a woman who got her house toilet papered and decided to hunt down the
culprits. She didn't want to involve the police, reasoning that they had
better things to do, so she took the following steps:* She canvassed local stores to see which one had a run on toilet paper.
* She then got the manager of the store to show her surveillance videos,
allowing her to see the personalized letterman's jacket of one of the
purchasers, as well as the license plate of the vehicle they got into.* Finally, she used a high school yearbook (matched to the school based on
the letterman's jacket) and online databases to get the names, phone numbers
and addresses of all the teens spotted in the store tapes.To me, this is a bit more than a "talker" feature. One takeaway, IMHO, is
that we're pretty far down the road to sheepdom when average citizens start
thinking "well, everything's monitored all the time anyway – let's see if I
can make use of that."
Reader comments:
Garrett says:
I saw the story you posted on BB about the tp
detective. I think you're being a little bit selective
in what you posted there. The full story lists how it
wasn't just an innocent tp incident, the woman's cars
were vandalized, her lawn fixtures damaged and her
lawn ruined with dog food and flour. The kids she
tracked down are facing felony charges, and I know
from bitter experience that means they did hundreds of
dollars in real, not just tp damages. Don't you think,
taking that into account, it's a bit more clear why
she persued this matter with such vigor? Portraying it
as just a tp'ed house makes her actions look alot more
extreme.
Roger Krueger says:
Here's another busted-by-grocery-store-video story, some teens building dry-ice bombs.
