Many Fort Dodge home owners and business owners now have a chance to help catch crooks in their community without doing anything remotely dangerous.

In fact, they have to do almost nothing to assist the Police Department through a newly announced initiative called the Community Camera Program. All they have to do is let the police know that they have surveillance cameras on their property and are willing to share the video from them if that’s ever necessary.

The police will keep a list of the property owners who sign up for the Community Camera Program. But officers won’t contact the property owners unless something happens in their neighborhood and investigators want to see if any activity was captured on camera.

The participation of property owners will be kept confidential. Police officers will be available to help the property owners with any technical problems they encounter trying to get images recorded by their cameras.

To become part of the Community Camera Program, all someone has to do is fill out a registration form on on the city web site, www.fortdodgeiowa.org. To find the form on the web site, select Your Government and then Police Department.

Security cameras are becoming more common by the day, it seems, and the traditional cameras have recently been joined by devices such as doorbells that capture video.

Catching criminals in the act is the basic purpose for all those devices. So why not share the images they capture with the police?

We believe the Community Camera Program is a great way to help the Police Department nab the crooks. We urge all property owners who have cameras to sign up for the program.