Dan's Papers - February 15, 2008

The historic Hamptons, founded by the English in 1640 with its beautiful wooden windmills and white church steeples and pre-revolutionary saltbox homes, is going high-tech. In the last three weeks, there's been quite a bit of it in the news.

First it was about a beach video camera. For anybody not familiar with this, these are video cameras mounted on trees, posts or roofs of homes that point out to the beach so that the owner of the equipment, often a surfer, can offer the images of the wave action to one and all on a website.

"Dude, it's gnarly at Ditch!"

In this case, this particular beach video cam, valued at $8,000, was mounted on a tall, wooden post on the East Hampton oceanfront property owned by Jerry Della Femina. Della Femina, who is a generous man, had let the owner of the video cam, a surfer and exercise guru named Jimmy Minardi, put it there so Minardi could show the conditions of Main Beach in East Hampton to all the surfers and exercise folks who go to minarditraining.com.

Sometime between 5 and 6 a.m. on December 5, somebody trespassed onto the Della Femina property and snatched the beach cam. Minardi knows that because you get the time monitored on a beach cam, and that's when the beach cam went flooie.

The perp, it turned out, didn't take the time to disconnect or unscrew the beach cam. He just cut the post down with a chainsaw. You could tell by the remaining stump of the post in the ground the next day. The perp just came by and zzzzzip it was gone.

"$8,000, just like that," Minardi said.

At the present time, the post is still a stump, and the perp remains at large. Minardi has gotten permission to replace it, but, according to his website, he is soliciting funds from users to finance the project and won't put it up until he can afford it. He also says that this time, he's gotten permission from Della Femina to put the web cam on the chimney of the house. "And I'm putting up a second hidden web cam to watch the first one. They're not getting this one."

Which leads this reporter to ponder, which web cam would a thief go after first if he strikes again? The beach web cam? Or the beach web cam watching web cam? Hmmm.

And what about all those folks who skinnydip in the Della Femina pool? Will they continue?

The second high-tech device in the news is a GPS system. They're pretty cheap now, and Suffolk County, which has a fleet of maybe two thousand vehicles, has had them installed in all of them. At any time, just by punching some numbers into a computer, anybody at County headquarters can see just exactly where each and every one of these vehicles is.

The purpose of it is, I think, to keep an eye on some bureaucrats who might have thought they'd drive the county vehicle that has been entrusted to them for a little personal getaway down to Savannah, Georgia for a long weekend - something that any county supervisor would frown upon if he knew. So now he would.

Weren't they surprised last week when they got a call from the Riverhead police saying that one of their employees had gone to his house to pick up some work related thing he forgot, ran inside to get it, and when he ran back out, the van was gone?

The County police got involved and pulled out all the stops. They had the GPS on it! The Riverhead police found the blip, headed after the perp in squad cars, and, directed by the County police overhead in helicopters who were watching the little location dot on the screen, closed in.

The perp drove the car down Cross River Drive, then right onto Old Country Road, then past Sears Bellows Park to Sunrise Highway and thence east to North Sea Road in Southampton (where the Southampton Town Police took up the chase). He headed up the road as far as Conscience Point, then turned around and headed back down North Sea Road back to across Route 27 and then pulled into McDonalds. There he got out of the car, and, seeing the chopper overhead and the officers running toward him from every direction, surrendered.

The alleged perp is Brian E. Davis, who may or may not have had a Big Mac in his hand raised high overhead. He was handcuffed, bundled up and carted away.

The third high-tech item in the news is apparently a computerized license plate reader. Two of them are mounted on the roof of one squad car in the Village of East Hampton, and as the squad car tootles along, the readers snaffle in the plate numbers and spit out the numbers of those who either have stolen registration or no registration or expired registration.

This information is beamed up to the helicopters who send out the signal and, in minutes, herds of policemen surround the suspected vehicle and, if a driver is inside about to turn the ignition, cry out in a chorus "come out with your hands up."

I am not making this up, except for the last part. Make sure your car registration is up to date.

When these items were installed a few weeks ago, a police officer commented, with considerable ingenuity I thought, "Obey the law and nothing bad will happen to you."