 Bavarian The New Orleans mayor suggested an idea to curb crime in the Big Easy, install a citywide system of security cameras. That was six years ago. Now the camera system is plagued with problems. Only a fraction of the planned 1,000 cameras are up and working, and of those, many actually aren't working. You'd think for about $6.6 million you'd get a pretty good crime camera system. They work in many other cities to hold down crime rates, but here in New Orleans, they don't work, and the reason seems to have to do something with Louisiana politics. The majority of those 250 cameras are not operational. We have four cameras, and they're fairly high resolution, so we have pretty much coverage of all the sidewalks. There was also another armed robbery in our driveway a couple of years ago, and it was about three women late at night, I guess around one o'clock, and a car came down the street and stopped, and a man got out with a gun, and two of the women ran away from him, but he grabbed one of the women and ripped her purse off of her. We didn't really realize what had happened until we saw a lot of police out in our driveway, so I went out and told them, I said, well, we probably have this on videotape, so they solved that crime practically overnight. We recognize that the NOPD 8th District here has quite a job, but they're stretched thin often, and they just don't have enough foot soldiers, and so we thought that we've got 4,000 residents, we can be part of their eyes too. We can help them. SAVE CAM's 8th program came about to help from the French Quarter Security Task Force to help NOPD with location of cameras that are throughout the French Quarter and the 8th District. I went from Canal Street all the way up to Bourbon Street looking at where the location of all the cameras were and writing down those locations, the contact information and stuff like that. All the detectives have iPads, and what they do is there's a link, and they click on the link, so if a robbery occurs in the next block, they click on that location where they're at and they can pull up and it'll show dots of where all cameras are in that area. Then they can click on that particular dot in the area and see contact information on the owner, see what the best time to get in touch with the owner is. In some cases, the cameras will actually tell them where the cameras are pointed. They'll know what footage they'll be obtaining when they get the camera. The seventh case was a private snatch, and this happened in 400 block of Bourbon Street. A gentleman was with his granddaughter, went out to take some photos. He says a black male came from behind, snatched the phone out of his hand and took off running. He couldn't give us the direction of flight. We tried tracking the video, but there's just too many people on Bourbon Street during that time. We always use the videos as one of the first things we look for. We're able to, on the scene, get real-time information about who has video, what's their name, where it's at. Larry and Bob, they're doing a tremendous job keeping that going. It's snowballing into a real success for us. Thank y'all. Thank you guys. I would hear them say, okay, we got video of this crime and we gave it to City Hall and we waited for the media to come to pick it up and they never came. So I said to the detective, why don't we put that on YouTube? He said, we've never done that before. He had to call the chief's office to get permission. So once they did that, and they got several thousand responses within the next week on that one, they said, maybe we should try it again. And it's just become routine now. A camera is not going to lie. A camera doesn't have to stand up at the courthouse and basically testify what you saw. The camera's going to do it for you. Knowing that you're going to, anywhere in the French Quarter you come, that you're going to be on video has deterred a lot of crime. I can't say that positive that that is, but we do have a 2% reduction in violent crime this year compared to last year with less officers. And it is strategies that we put in place, but it's also the assistance of the camera system. I had to say that I believe that knowing that you're going to be on camera if you come to the quarters is a big deterrent. As far as these young guys who are out here hustling, they see the French Quarter as an easy mark. You know, this is where I can go. And they've got sense enough to look at the reports of the TV cameras to see that these low-resolution cameras that people are investing in their homes don't really identify anybody. So you don't really have to be that much afraid about being caught on camera. I think a lot of tourists think this is Disneyland. It's safe and it's protected and people are not going to carry guns. They're not going to carry knives. They're not going to walk up from behind, push them to the side, grab their iPhone and run off. You know, a block later, people recover and look up and they have no idea who's committed the crime against them. To me, it's a security blanket. People want to believe that this is another crime prevention measure. Instead of trying to solve this problem of getting jobs for these kids, raising up the wages for their parents, they decided that what we'll do, we'll just arm ourselves against these invaders. I believe that the cause of the crime is the great social distance between the poor people and the rich people. We can't separate that from how bad is the poverty situation in New Orleans. New Orleans has 38 percent of the population that lives below the poverty line. Sixty percent of our children live below the poverty line. I would say that that is the nexus in which we can discuss the whole question of crime.