Video of a man Cleveland police identified as Michael Steele was caught on a camera mounted on the outside of Kelly Plating shortly after Frank's Bait & Tackle on Berea Road was robbed on July 2.The footage was recorded the morning of July 2, shortly after a masked man with a gun crept up on a cashier at Frank's Bait and Tackle on Berea Road as she cleaned the minnow tank.
The assailant raced off with hundreds of dollars in cash, knives -- and six packs of smokes.
But he made the mistake of heading east on Madison Avenue.
Within days, the work of a creative new coalition of business owners, neighborhood safety staff and police helped lead to an arrest in the case and solve a rash of recent West Side robberies.
The speedy arrest of a neighborhood man is a dramatic example of how the merchants hope the new high-tech surveillance project that has a swath of Madison Avenue blanketed by cameras can change the direction of a struggling commercial district.
The still-expanding experiment was primarily the work of merchants and neighborhood entrepreneur Mike Lewis, who owns Security Installations.
With Lewis' help, Cudell Improvement Inc [2]. and Ward 16 Councilman Jay Westbrook [3]offered the merchants new, discounted camera systems to replace a patchwork of antiquated cameras that often captured fuzzy images on tapes.
The program went online toward the end of April with at least 10 camera systems added to the existing ones covering Madison Avenue between West 85th and West 105th streets.
Video of a man Cleveland police identified as Michael Steele was caught on a camera mounted on the outside of Kelly Plating shortly after Frank's Bait & Tackle on Berea Road was robbed on July 2.Since then, the electronic eyes have witnessed drug deals, car break-ins, a shooting -- and a man later identified as 33-year-old Michael Steele running down Madison Avenue with a bag of cigarettes, leading police virtually to the door of his apartment.
http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2011/07/madison_avenue_merchants_fight.h... [4]
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