Tommy Carolin woke up at about 4:30 a.m. on Sept. 4 to a strange, bright light coming through the windows of his Dartmouth Avenue house. In the driveway, his car was “engulfed in flames,” burning so hot it warped the house’s siding.
“My car was completely incinerated,” the senior finance and government and politics major said.
Despite a four-year project to install security cameras in Old Town College Park, Carolin’s case and many of the other 32 reports of vandalism in the area in the last two months sit open. While student victims expressed frustration, police said the cameras aren’t a panacea, with the open cases testing the limits of the technology.
The cameras cost about $1,000 each, not including the cost of maintenance and data storage, said University Police spokesman Maj. Marc Limansky. There are 16 total, spaced evenly in the Old Town neighborhood on streets including College Avenue, Knox Road and Dickinson Avenue, said Bob Ryan, College Park public services director.
“I would think it would be likely the people responsible for car vandalisms will be caught on video in that area,” Ryan said.
The City Council has approved a number of surveillance camera projects, with one of the largest in 2010, in the hopes that the cameras would reduce crime, though the recent vandalism has taken place outside the cameras’ scope.
Carolin said he and his roommates filed a report with Prince George’s County Police, which covers their house in its jurisdiction, and investigators told them it was too dark for the cameras to offer meaningful leads or positive identifications.
“There’s nothing to quell my fears or my roommates’ fears,” Carolin said, about two months after the incident. “They said the footage was probably not high enough definition.”
Limansky said the quality of footage deteriorates at night, when most of the vandalism cases occurred.
“You lose a lot of quality and detail,” he said.
Though the city owns the cameras, University Police monitor the footage. County police can access it at any time; they just have to give University Police details about what segment of footage they’re looking for, Limansky said.
Sophomore business student Kacy Stein’s car also was parked on Dickinson Avenue when it was vandalized overnight, twice in the same week. She said a neighbor reported seeing three men gathered around the car. The group allegedly scattered when one man climbed on the hood and then fell into the windshield.
“The windshield had been completely shattered,” Stein said.
Stein said police told her there were no cameras covering the area where her car was parked. According to previous Diamondback reports, grants and funding have constrained the city’s choices of camera location and the number they can buy.
County police spokesman Lt. Bill Alexander said the cameras are focused on high pedestrian traffic areas rather than cars, which limits their use in vandalism cases.
“As much as we would like to catch the people who are doing these things that way, that’s not reality,” Alexander said. “You need a lead, for someone to come forward or for some video showing who’s responsible for that vandalism, and that’s incredibly tough.”
Senior staff writer Talia Richman contributed to this report.
