Along Brookside Drive in Edgewood, residents have grown tired of watching drugs, gangs, guns and violence overrun their neighborhood.

Soon, police could be watching, too.

Harford County Sheriff Jesse Bane wants to install a surveillance camera system in Edgewood similar to one in Baltimore and another being developed in Aberdeen.

Bane said it remains unclear how many cameras the neighborhood would need and how they would be financed. But he said they would be a key element of policing the 1800 block of Brookside Drive, which has been shaken by two homicides on the same block in just over a year and five homicides since July 2006

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“I’m not going to worry if there’s one camera or 10; I want to make sure that community has the resources it needs to be safe,” Bane said.

That will require enough camera coverage to discourage crime throughout the neighborhood, he said.

“I don’t want a situation where we spend a lot to put up a camera, and all they need to do is go 20 paces down the street to hide again,” he said.

Ruth Alexander, a resident of the block where 25-year-old Samuel David Horne was shot and killed Aug. 11, said she would welcome police cameras.

“I can’t wait for it to get up,” she said. “It’s just terrible out here and we are definitely tired of it.”

If police don’t install cameras soon, Alexander said, she would encourage residents to buy their own cameras and keep them pointed at the street, saving recordings on their home computers, VCRs or DVD players.

Mildred Samy, Horne’s mother and a former community activist in Edgewood, said she also would support a police camera system, but emphasized that it would take more arrests and enforcement to discourage crime.

The drug culture hit close to home, her son had been arrested several times for dealing, court records show.

Yet when Samy was out in the neighborhood railing against violence on her bullhorn, Horne would ask his friends to keep an eye on his mother and keep her safe, she said.

“My son was my driving force; trying to get him off the streets,” Samy said. “Just because he was my son, it didn’t mean I’d forgive him the things he’d do or the people he’d associate with.”

msantoni@baltimoreexaminer.com

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