Two Park St. area businesses broken into early Friday; chief encourages installation of inexpensive security cameras

by Dan McClelland

Early Friday, March 15 two local businesses- Anne Eldred’s Cabin Fever and Florals on Upper Park Street and Alicia Nichols’ hairdressing salon, Shear Paradise, on Cliff Ave. were broken into, with the perpetrators making off with some valuables, and leaving some damage in their wake.

In Miss Nichols’ case, she lost two computer tablets, some cash and a good amount of her jewelry she makes from clay and sells in her shop.

The culprits who broke into Cabin Fever and Floral took cash and the cash register that held it. They also broke many items in the store, including the front door and door leading into a shop from the lobby.

Chief Eric Proulx said Monday that his officers are investigating both incidents which appear to be connected. “All I can tell you right now, however, is that those two businesses were broken into, and at this time we don’t have any suspects.”

“We do have some video footage of possible suspects taken on Park Street” around 2a.m. Friday. Both break-ins were the same night.

As part of the investigation of the crimes so far and the departments’ canvassing of those and other businesses Chief Proulx said Monday he was “quite discouraged to find the lack of video cameras” employed throughout the uptown business district.

“I would have thought more people would have had cameras in their businesses.”

Chief Proulx said he has installed Blink brand cameras at his house and at his family members’ houses. He said the “door bell” style cameras work well as long as they are not mounted too far away from the doors.

The cameras can be set to pick up video footage at different distances for the door, he explained.

“One of the best camera systems I’ve seen used in town is the Lorex brand with 4K resolution cameras.”

He said he routinely sends his officers to a business with one in town, if there’s an investigation in that part of the community. “The clarity of the Lorex videos is unbelievable.”

He said Lorex is a little more expensive than the Blink or Ring systems, noting: “but you get what you pay for.”

He said a Blink system with three cameras sells for about $150.

“You don’t have to have a complicated system where you need someone to come wire them for you. They mount on the side of your house, they run on batteries, and you hook them into your wireless network. The video footage is stored in The Cloud and goes right to your cell phone!”

The chief said he installed a system at his parents’ house and that morning, his vehicle was scheduled to go into the shop for service and so he went to his parents’ house to borrow their vehicle for the day. “I just stepped inside their garage when my cell phone rang and it was my mother wondering why I was in their garage.”

“It was 7a.m. and I’m sure the pinging on her phone woke her up, and I told her it was just me, so go back to bed,” he said with a chuckle.

He did say, however, those new cameras are a relatively inexpensive way to beef up residential security.

The chief said he would encourage more residents here to install those systems at their residences and businesses. “The fact we are no longer around at night and so much happens at night,” he would recommend that.

“Back when we were a full-time police department, the night shift officers knew the people who were out in the community at night. If something happened on a particular night the night shift officers probably saw the people who were out and about and so they could furnish the day shift officers with that list of people they saw on their night patrols.

“They could tell them this person was out last night, or I saw this other person. That’s how we solved crime here then!”

He said the troopers patrolling the community now- particularly during the evenings and nights when there is no longer a village police presence, don’t often know the locals, so they can’t provide to us the identities of those people they may have seen overnight.

The chief said it makes it more difficult for his officers, who come into the station each morning “blind” for the start of their shift in the morning and learn about crimes that happened overnight. He said they don’t have that informal information-gathering from the night before to use to begin their investigations.

“In the full-time police department days, we knew who was driving cars around town late at night, those who were walking around,” and that would give us a head’s up on solving crime here.