Cameras Help Group Widen Safety Net

Seen as crime deterrent

BY P.J. REILLY Intelligencer Journal Staff

Lancaster Community Safety Coalition has its eyes on the Church Street Towers and Farnum Street East apartment buildings.

The coalition on Thursday showed off five security cameras it mounted on the city Housing Authority-owned buildings as part of its video monitoring program.

"Farnum Street East and Church Street Towers house a very vulnerable segment of the population, including the elderly and physically disabled," said Bob Schellhamer, the housing authority's executive director. "The cameras will allow us to address problems while they are occurring and will serve as a deterrent to future crimes."

Dale Witmer, executive director of the safety coalition, said the images captured by the cameras will be monitored by coalition staff - not the city police.

"We want people to know that it's not the government watching them," he said. City police will be contacted, however, when criminal activity is recorded by the cameras, Witmer said.

The coalition is a community-based, nonprofit organization created in response to recommendations by the Lancaster Crime Commission.

Including the five cameras unveiled Thursday, Witmer said the Coalition now operates nine security cameras in the city.

For more than a year, cameras have been keeping an eye on the area around North Lime and East King streets and around the coalition's headquarters in the UGI Building at South Prince and Conestoga streets.

Witmer said the cameras, which can be rotated 360 degrees, have recorded thefts, drug sales, drug use and prostitution and even helped police avoid a murder investigation.

Witmer said a man with head injuries was reported dead to city police last year in an area monitored by one of the coalition's cameras.

Before launching a manhunt to find the man's killer, Witmer said, police asked the coalition if it caught anything on tape.

"Police initially thought the man had been beaten, but our camera showed him sit down and then fall forward into the street, which is what caused his head injuries," Witmer said. "Two minutes worth of video saved them hundreds of hours of police work."

The cameras and the fiber optic cables that feed the video to the coalition's headquarters cost about $67,000, according to Witmer. That cost was covered by Bosch Security Systems, the housing authority and the coalition.

Jack Howell, executive director of Lancaster Alliance and a safety coalition board member, said the organization expects to install more cameras in the city.

"The cameras are set up to be an extension of the community," Howell said. "They perform a service, and that service is to keep an eye out for trouble."

"I support the use of video
cameras as an important tool
that law enforcement and residents
can rely upon to enhance
public safety."

Mayor J. Richard Gray