How We Fought Back Against Vandalism

It’s been an eventful few months, that’s for sure. Recently, we began having a huge problem with vandalism. In a little over one month’s time, we had our car window smashed out not once, but twice.

This is our car after it was bashed in the second time. The first time our car window was smashed out, I figured it was probably somebody who just thoughtlessly smashed it out on a whim. But when the exact same window got smashed out just a few weeks after we replaced it, it was sickening to know that we were being maliciously targeted. Someone who goes out of their way to do that just for fun has some serious issues – they never even stole anything, it was purely destruction for the sake of destruction.

Our quiet rural road has become very busy over the last few years as more housing is built. With this has been an increase in loud weekend parties, and since our home is right off the side of the road, we will hear very loud (And presumably intoxicated!) people walk by our window during the wee hours on weekends. Unfortunately, the fact that our road is not well-lit and is more of a “Back road” makes it easier for mischief-makers to lurk undetected. As a result, residents are beginning to experience vandalism, theft, and cars racing down the road at 120 mph in the middle of the night. One of our neighbors was just telling us how someone had snuck into their driveway and siphoned off their gas along with stealing some items out of their car. Another acquaintance saw someone stealing mail further down the road. To be honest, it’s been a disconcerting and upsetting few months as a homeowner.

The window-smashing always happens on a Saturday night, so my guess is that someone goes to one of those loud parties near our street and then smashes our window out while they walk home. Either that, or it’s one of the speed racers who drives like a maniac down our road slowing down and reaching out their window to smash our car. My home never had a driveway previously, and having to park on the side of the road made us such a target because everyone could see our car and reach it easily. They probably drove by and laughed as we waited for traffic to go by just so we could sweep up the glass.

Honestly, it was devastating. Not only was the cost of replacing the glass a big financial burden on us, but it took so much time out of our already-crammed schedules replacing the window (Jai did it himself, since I can only imagine how much more it would have cost to take it to a shop), cleaning it up, and trying to tape plastic bags over it while we waited for the glass to arrive. This took over a week each time, so in the meantime our car upholstery was getting drenched by rain.

Sadly, this isn’t the first time we’ve experience vandalism – it’s just the worst. My house has never had a driveway, so we were forced to park our cars on the shoulder of the road. Not only is it extremely difficult to get out of your car – I essentially had to unload groceries in the street, so you have to wait for a break in cars – but it also makes you a big target since you car is easily accessed by any pedestrian walking by. Everyone knows exactly where we live and even when we are home or not. Jai and I both started to despair and feel at the end of our rope. Installing a driveway was completely out of our budget, and so was replacing our windows every few weeks. And what about next time? Would they smash all our windows when they came back? Or maybe start throwing rocks into our home’s windows, since that’s exposed to the street too? We felt helpless.

However, there was one sliver of hope in our gameplan to fight back: Our security camera. Remember our review of the D-Link Day/Night Network Camera back in February? We put this to work to try and catch the baddies in action. Ironically, when the vandalism occurred, we had the camera pointed towards our porch and not the car since we assumed that’s where we’d most need surveillance. So sadly, we did not get a picture of the culprit because the camera was not monitoring the location where the car was parked. Then, we set about mounting the camera above or on the door and installing some other protective measures. This happened during a very hectic weekend, and before we had a chance to finish the project, the vandals came back. ARGH!

So now, we have the camera mounted permanently on the front door. This allows a good view of both where the vehicle was parked and those who come to the door. In addition, we mounted this motion-activated floodlight to illuminate and frighten would-be criminals (Especially since this road is so dark!), as well as this sign which lets people know that we have surveillance in place. Between the camera prominently displayed and blinking in the window, the large sign, and the light, it definitely seemed to make people take notice. If I open the surveillance window at any given time, I will usually see pedestrians walking past staring at the camera. I hate to look so paranoid, but when you are being attacked, you have to fight back. If that’s what it takes to get the message across that I will not be an easy target, then that is what I must do.

And there was another sliver of hope. After our window got smashed out a second time, our family felt so bad for us having to deal with this that my future father-in-a-law, a contractor, showed up with a dump truck of fill and offered to build it for us.

Yes, what you are looking at is a DRIVEWAY!!! There are not enough exclamation points to express my excitement about this, for so many reasons. So there was a positive thing that came out of this whole awful experience: Although one person went out of their way to make us miserable, many more good people responded with kindness. Several members of Jai’s family offered to help with the construction, labor, and fill. I can’t begin to tell you how much to meant to us or how touched we are by it.

Once we had a driveway, we figured we should either move the camera or get a second one, since we now park on our property rather than by the front door. We thought it would be a good idea to get a second, as we’d really like to get multiple angles to increase our odds of getting a license plate number if the hoodlum(s) come back and happen to be driving. As luck would have it, the MovieNite Plus unit which I reviewed last week not only allows you to view your D-Link security camera right on the TV, but it also supports up to 4 camera, so D-Link sent me a second complimentary D-Link DCS-932L so that we could test out the split screen option. We just set this camera up yesterday, and I’d like to walk you through what we did and where we placed them.

This is camera #1, mounted on our door. It’s affixed directly to the glass so it can see part of the porch as well as the road. Since my office is right around the corner from the front door, Jai ran the cable from the camera directly through to my computer.

This is what it looks like when it goes into night mode. You can see an awesome amount of detail on it, and the floodlight helps to illuminate it even more.

Here is our brand new camera #2, overlooking our brand new driveway! You can see what a great view we have of the car and the street in the background. We placed this right on our windowsill and ran the cable to the outlet by the entertainment center. Easy!

Here is what camera #2 looks like at night. It’s blurry because of the glare from the nightvision LEDS against the inside of the window, as we don’t yet have a floodlight installed on this side of the house. Believe me, that’s coming soon – even if we didn’t have vandalism issues, we’d still want to see when we got out of the car. 😉

Here’s an outside view of camera #2:

So how does it all work? The cameras operate wirelessly and are quite simple to install. To record the photos, we decided to set up a dedicated computer that they can be uploaded to – you can choose to have the pictures emailed to you instead, but Gmail thinks that getting that many emails so quickly is SPAM and didn’t let them come through! We have it set to record snapshots whenever it detects motion, so understandably, it’s a lot of photos. We usually just turn it on at night or when we don’t plan on being home. You can also view a streaming look at the cameras anytime via your computer, smartphone, or a MovieNite Unit:

Check out that split-screen view – makes me feel like a security guard! I love that MovieNite is so versatile in that it provides entertainment through Netflix, YouTube, and other streaming video applications as well as practical features such as camera monitoring. It’s easy to set up to work with your cameras – just enter your D-Link camera username and password, and hey presto! It will be added to the application and show live, streaming video from your camera(s) on your TV. How awesome is it that this device can help me protect my home and get rid of cable?

You can also record video if you want and enable sound recording. As an aside, I think these would be great as a baby monitor too, because you can use them as a security camera once your baby outgrows it – it’s not just another baby item you’ll have to get rid of.

It’s been close to 2 months since the last vandalism incident, and so far, so good. People seem to be taking note of the cameras and I feel like it’s done a good job of letting passer-bys know that we will be aware of any damage they try to cause. I think its presence alone could be enough to stop mischief before it starts. Having bright, blinking cameras visible in the window really sends a message. And if someone does vandalize our cars again, we’ll have it on film and will have more to go off in terms of trying to identify the perpetrator. I’m going to post an update in August to let you know how it goes with the second camera over the next few weeks and if we have any incidents in that time. Meanwhile, if you’d like a chance to win one of these cameras for your own use, click here and enter our giveaway which runs until August 10th!

D-Link Day/Night Network Cameras retail for $129.99 – click here for a list of retailers. Additionally, the MovieNite player that compliments these cameras is available for $79.99; you can find retailer information for MovieNite here.