YouTube Proves Worth as Crime-Fighting Tool

Sept. 29, 2009 — -- The videos capture scenes of furtive and not-so-furtive criminal activity: a house break-in in Florida; prowlers in Los Angeles, lurking outside Lindsay Lohan's door.

No, it's not a bold new reality series. The videos are part of a novel approach to crime fighting.

In the old days, property owners seeking to discourage trespassers had dogs. In Westerns they have rifles. But these days, there is a new weapon: the Internet.

In Atlanta, Dan and Alyssa Kopp are taking advantage of that weapon, fighting crime with YouTube.

"It's an emerging neighborhood, the problems are what they are," Alyssa Kopp said of the couple's locale. "Police cannot be everywhere, so rather than being reactive to a problem, we took a proactive approach."

The Kopps declined to say exactly how many cameras they have around their home.

"We have a number of them," Dan Kopp said.

"We're a little elusive about that," his wife added.

One video the Kopps shot, which now has more than 40,000 views on YouTube, shows a break-in at their Atlanta home one year ago, while they were at work.

"We were both at work and received a call from our alarm company that the alarm was going off ... there was no reason for it to be going off, so we told them to dispatch the police," Alyssa Kopp said. "When we got home, we found out that our house had been broken into, that our door had been kicked in and some items were missing, including a flat-screen TV, a laptop and a digital camera."

"It was just like fear and panic and, you know, the moment you hoped would never come and there it was right in front of you," Dan Kopp said.

As bad as the moment was, it was also a chance for filmmaking, because the Kopps had installed a video surveillance system and caught the whole thing on tape.

"We pulled up the video for the police," Alyssa Kopp said. "It was a rarity for them to have something like that at their disposal, you know, to help them, so they were pretty excited and they actually encouraged us to maybe get it out to local news, to see if we could get it publicized to try and get an I.D., a tip, anything."