Wednesday, July 7, 2004 | 11:03 a.m.
There's no better case for installing digital cameras in Las Vegas taxicabs than the disturbing news I'm about to give you.
Hopefully, the five-member State Taxicab Authority Board, which five months ago refused to require the cameras, will get the message.
Taxicab Authority Administrator Yvette Moore, a strong camera proponent who reports to the board, tells me that investigators have uncovered two more cases of serial robbers in the valley.
That makes a total of three cases responsible for 13 (nearly half) of the 29 reported robberies against cabbies this year. Suspects in all three cases have yet to be captured.
In the most recent case, a string of five robberies between June 15 and last Thursday have been linked to the same three suspects. In all five heists, Moore said, a black female passenger lured cabbies to the area of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Alta Drive, where they were robbed by two black male accomplices.
A single suspect also is responsible for two robberies in May and early June, Moore said.
And there's the first serial case last discussed in this space two months ago. The suspect in that case is responsible for eight robberies, six of which have occurred since January.
Moore believes we might not be dealing with any serial robbers today if all cabs had cameras.
"We certainly believe we could apprehend them quicker with photographic evidence," she says.
If you don't believe Moore, consider the plight of the first serial robber. He hasn't struck since Feb. 19, when authorities released a photo of him taken from a casino surveillance camera during his eighth robbery.
This information is known to the Taxicab Authority Board, but it hasn't gotten the board off its duff to require cameras.
"It's upsetting," says Craig Harris, a driver who publishes the Trip Sheet, a magazine for cabbies. "The board should be taking a more proactive approach. It's just dragging its feet."
In February the board had a chance to approve a regulation that would have mandated cameras, but it took a pass after caving in to company owners who didn't want to foot the bill. Instead, the board voted to further study the issue, which Moore has already studied to death.
Now it turns out the new "study," which hasn't even gotten under way, isn't going to be much of a study at all. UNLV economics professor Keith Schwer plans to do a survey of drivers, which Moore already has done, and analyze camera studies in other cities that Moore presented to the board five months ago.
Schwer's work is being funded by none other than those tightwad owners.
The owners weren't happy with the results of Moore's survey in January, which found that drivers favored cameras by a 2-1 margin. So they persuaded the Taxicab Authority Board to re-examine the issue, and then they volunteered to pay for the new "study" in the hopes of getting more desirable results.
My guess, however, is that Schwer, even with the tainted money from the owners, is going to discover that drivers want the protection of cameras.
And he's going to figure out what Yvette Moore and anyone with common sense already knows -- that cameras can help catch crooks.
So the only thing this "study" is going to accomplish is to give the Taxicab Authority Board more time to sit back and watch more cabbies fall victim to crime.
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