It's never fun to wake up in the morning and realize your property has been vandalized. But yet amidst of weekend full of personal family strife that's exactly what happened. We noticed that a common neighborhood tagger who painted "666" on various houses in our neighborhood has struck last night on us. Admittedly it's wasn't very large, but it's the concept of people purposely messing with our property and vandalizing it that really sticks in my craw. Usually it's people who live the neighborhood so I can't for the life of me understand why they would want to shit all over it. Makes no sense to me at all, but then again and actions of the ignorant rarely do.
The awesome part of this story is that we have two security cameras at the front of our house so a quick review of the tapes shows the vandal very clearly at 4:40 am this morning. The part that shocked us (and really, I'm surprised anything shocks me anymore) was that the vandal was a late 20's, upper middle classes looking white female wearing what appeared to be expensive shoes and carrying an expensive designer handbag. Not exactly the type of person you expect to tag your home now is it? We got two fantastic photos of her face, one of her doing the actual tagging and another as she walked away with her boyfriend. It was also very clear from the video that she didn't specifically target our house; she walked by and then doubled back upon second thought, presumably after seeing a nice flat surface to write on and digs in her bag for the marker. Even though it wasn't a big deal to clean up for us, we knew she was the same person who had done much more damage to neighboring buildings, so we called the police to report it. I'm a firm believer in reporting anything along these lines, as the number of crimes reported each year dictate funding and manpower for each precinct. So the cops came and filed a report and we gave them the two crystal clear photos of the vandal. They were shocked as well, not only by the type of person committing the crime, but by how accurate our camera's caught her face and the exact time. I'm pretty sure nothing will come of it, but just in case we can know we did our part.
Upon Eric's insistence I'm not posting the photos of the vandal here. He is apparently much less vindictive than I am, but he's right in saying that posting them here probably won't get us any closer to nailing her. But if by chance she reads this she'll know that the police have some great photos of her committing a crime they take very seriously.
We were able to get it off with some Goof Off—is there anything that stuff can't remove?
Hey- send me those picts of the girl.... I need to study for my next "move!"
Posted by: JMK | September 17, 2008 at 02:12 AM
What kind of video system do you have? I've been looking for something that can shoot clear pictures. Is it DVR based?
Posted by: DHL | September 18, 2008 at 11:06 PM
Hey DHL - Eric has worked in physical security so we made our own system. Ran the wiring wall the walls were open and have a server downstairs with camera capture cards. we bought each camera separately based on the location and needs, so we pretty much cobbled the thing together. The recording is hard disk based--the camera card/software was made my Aver. I know you can buy more inclusive systems rather than piece it together like we did, but our solution was cheaper and allowed us to customize the camera type based on location and need. Hope this helps.
Posted by: dana | September 19, 2008 at 12:48 PM
Love the door!
Posted by: JMK | September 20, 2008 at 09:40 PM