How Renton’s new security camera program has worked so far

Renton police are asking for the public’s help to crack down on crime, and they are doing it with a new app and a whole lot of security cameras spread throughout the city.

Cyndie Parks with the Renton Police Department says officers used to have a book at the front desk filled with addresses of business and residents with security cameras. They used it whenever there was a crime in the area and needed to ask people if their cameras caught anything helpful. But it was too low tech to be efficient.

“They were just having folks register, and there was basically a database kept at the front counter … they could kind of flip through the address and try to narrow down where there could be cameras in the area,” Parks said. “I knew that was too labor intensive. We are a city with a population of over 104,000.”

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Parks went to the city’s IT department with a question: could they make an online map showing where all the security cameras in Renton were located?

“We didn’t have anything like that at the time that could support a program … and we kept meeting and finally they built it,” Park said. “We’ve never had anything like that here before, for any other department even.”

Renton’s IT department came up with an online map, marking the location of private security cameras. Residents and businesses have to register and give their permission to be included.

“Once that registration is submitted via the city’s website, it creates this little balloon shape at an address where a camera is registered,” Park said. “When officers click on that, it brings up all the information for that registration. So if there were a dynamic situation where officers needed to get a hold of somebody to see if they possibly had footage of something that may have occurred in the area they have all the information at hand.”

Renton police cannot tap into the camera feeds nor gain access to the cameras online. The map is essentially a list of security cameras and phone numbers to call if they need to ask the owner for permission to view video.

“Law enforcement can be looked at like ‘big brother,'” Park said. “It was important to me when I pushed out this information that folks understood that we couldn’t tap into their system … it’s voluntary, they don’t have to register.”

One example of why the program is helpful, which Park points to, is a case that began just days before the program started.

“We had a homicide about a month or so ago, a young man was brutally beaten and murdered in a multi-housing property,” Park said. “It was just two or three days before I released this program. The officers and detectives had to go door-to-door, canvassing. They pushed out on social media that they needed video footage. It became labor intensive and sucked up tons of man hours trying to solve this case, trying to find a suspect.”

“It was video footage that they eventually found that was able to tie everything together and we were able to make an arrest off of that,” she said. “But it took much, much longer than it would have had we had that information off hand.”

Had the program been up and running, the detectives could have looked at the online map and called a camera owner within minutes.

It’s been about three weeks since Renton launched the new program.

“Within two hours, we had about 60 cameras registered,” Park said. “Which was just mind blowing.”

Today, there are more than 100 cameras registered for the program.

“I think folks have just had it, and they want a piece of being able to keep crime down and deter suspicious activity and they are just sick of it,” Park said. “….I think that any time a police department works this hard to get their community involved to deter crime, they are all over it.”