Cameras offer TV surveillance in town of 420

SANBORN, Minn. — The mooning was an act of protest. Recorded in all its glory last fall, it was transmitted onto the television screen in Judy Trebesch's office at City Hall. And while nearly everyone in this town of about 420 people knows about the incident — and a few think they know the person attached to that bottom — the offense is now accepted as the price one must occasionally pay for the comfort of security.

Nine cameras eyeball Main Street and the few roads into Sanborn, a southwestern Minnesota town plopped among some of the most fertile soybean fields in America. There's a bank but no stoplight, no school, no grocery store and, since the digital cops started keeping their 24/7 vigil last fall, not as much anxiety about crime.

"Things have calmed down pretty good," said Tom Platz, who runs Tom & Jerry's Corner Bar. From the cool darkness of his saloon, Platz (which is pronounced "Plates") has a three-decade-long perspective of what goes on along Main Street.

Right now, he likes what he sees — and doesn't see.

"I'm probably the only one up at 1 or 2 in the morning, and I don't see kids up squealing their tires and raising hell like they used to," Platz said.

In recent years, big cities — Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Minneapolis and others — have embraced security cameras to help police monitor public activity in downtowns and on roads.

With nine cameras, or one for every 46 residents, Sanborn is establishing a new threshold in the fight against crime. And in such a small town, some might wonder just how many moments long a secret can last before it's spilled at Tom & Jerry's or passed around at the regular pinochle game at City Hall.

The Redwood County sheriff, in Redwood Falls, is 23 miles away. People here say they can't afford their own police force: It would cost well into six figures annually. And they're convinced through recent experience that the rent-a-constable from a town down the road just doesn't stop drug deals or break-ins or otherwise keep the peace.

"By the time he gets his socks on, the crook's gone," said Martin Ziegler, a local sausage-maker who wears a shirt inscribed with "Have a Wienerful Day."

It was Ziegler who pushed to get the cameras installed after a stranger chased his 10-year-old daughter in broad daylight. His wife, Joyce, smiles when she notes that kids are "intimidated" by them.

It's not that this town or county is a high-crime zone. Redwood County, with a population of about 16,000 scattered over 880 square miles of farmland, recorded one murder in 2004, 16 aggravated assaults, 81 burglaries, 265 larcenies, seven rapes and 30 car thefts. Narcotics arrests totaled 35, all but 10 of them for marijuana.

The cameras were installed last November, at a cost of $29,000 — much of it donated — and only after a pretty hard sales job. Ziegler said some men worried that their wives would learn how much time they were spending at Tom & Jerry's or the American Legion hall across the street.

"If your wife doesn't want you sitting at the bar so much, then maybe you shouldn't do it," is what Ziegler said he told them. That remark apparently led to the protest pants-dropping episode last November.

In fact, the cameras are aimed only at the streets and do not record anyone going into Tom & Jerry's or the Legion hall.

Shortly after they went up, someone broke into the lumber company on Main Street and stole the safe. The opened safe was recovered in southern Iowa but authorities never did nab the thieves, despite catching a look at the pickup truck on the camera.

The notion of Big Brother watching your every move is not the reality in Sanborn, where the video is streamed to a 15-inch TV set on a kitchen countertop in Trebesch's small office, right next to a Paul Newman spaghetti-sauce poster. The screen is divided into nine squares, each reporting in mind-numbing accuracy what is happening on the streets of Sanborn. The images are recorded and kept for seven days.

Trebesch hates it. In fact, the set is usually turned off. "I can't watch it," she said.

If something happens, officials will run through the digital images and then call the sheriff, who also has access to the video feed. Then, theoretically, the chase is on.