Chennai: Frustrated over frequent property offences — at least one in every two weeks — people in Mudichur, a small suburban neighborhood, decided to fund and execute a CCTV surveillance system in Saravana Bhava Nagar by installing 28 cameras at a cost of Rs 2.75 lakh.
Mudichur, one of the worst flood-hit areas of 2015 during the deluge, witnessed as many as 29 property offences. “Of the 29 cases, 16 instances of crimes happened during day time. There were eight cases of housebreaks during daytime and nine at night. In the same period, the neighbourhood witnessed five cases of attention diversion and seven chain snatching cases,” police sources disclosed.
Apart from the crimes recorded at the Peerkankaranai police, which is eight km away from Mudichur, there were incidents of two wheeler thefts and attempts at housebreaks, sources added.
The residents who were demanding a police station or at least an outpost nearby had finally decided to take things more seriously than entirely depending on the police to prevent crimes in their area.
“There were too many incidents of crimes in the recent past. We have to travel nearly 8 km to seek police help. So the residents contributed and decided to set up a CCTV surveillance system, which got activated on Tamil New Year Day on April 14,” said P Damodaran, local panchayat chief.
As many as 28 surveillance cameras have been fixed in five streets of Saravana Bhava Nagar, which has 124 houses. In every street, one house is designated as the controlling and monitoring hub. When neigbouring areas came to know about this venture, residents’ welfare association members of AN Colony and Swamy Nagar are also seriously contemplating to have CCTV surveillance systems in their streets and monitoring it themselves to help detection of crime and criminals.
