On a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Katy, TX, Nick Nicoletti drove his blue Ram pickup truck to the front of the Westfield HOA neighborhood. He got out, wearing a baseball cap and blue jeans, a blue pen in the left breast pocket of his plaid button down shirt.

With a backdrop of tree-lined walkways weaving through a community of one and two-story houses, Nick explained how his neighborhood, technically in unincorporated Harris County, straddles multiple jurisdictional boundaries. The Harris County Sheriff’s Office provides law enforcement while the local Municipal Utility District (MUD) has taxing authority to cover water, sewer, trash removal, and security for several neighborhoods.

“You kinda know what the MUDs are because they’re the people you typically call about trash pick up. But I actually wanted a more involved understanding of the MUDs, so I went to their meeting and talked to them about our neighborhood’s security needs,” he nonchalantly said.

That’s exactly who Nick is. He’s the type of person who wants to make his community better. If something seems off, if the community’s safety needs improvement, he’ll attend the local utility meeting to find out what he can do to make his community safer.

A rise in neighborhood crime led to the HOA board investigating security options

As local news reported, in the last few years there had been a significant increase in gang-related crime in Houston-area neighborhoods. “There were some instances where they were shooting across the street from each other, “ Nick said. The Westfield HOA decided they needed to look into better options to combat the crime and increase the neighborhood’s security.

Nick first approached the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. He considered hiring an off-duty deputy to patrol his neighborhood, but ran the math and found it cost-prohibitive. “To get one deputy 24 hours a day, 365 days a year would cost about a half a million dollars. That wasn’t practical,” he said. And if the cost alone wasn’t a deterrent, the Westfield HOA has 1,500 homes and 11 entrances. “We’d need to hire 11 deputies to cover all of our entrances,” Nick said.

Next, Nick looked into putting in a community owned camera system. “If we did that, we’d have to fix it, maintain it, worry about footage storage. When it broke down, who’d fix it? Who’d even know when it was broken down? It’s just not practical.”

And Nick is a practical man. He wanted something that “would help the officers solve crimes. And that’s what led us to Flock Safety.”

Flock Safety was the most effective, efficient technology choice

In Nick’s words, the “number-one most cost-effective thing you can use is Flock Safety license plate reading technology. It’s very reasonable when you consider it’s 24/7 and it records every vehicle coming in and out of your neighborhood.”

The discreet technology blends in with the community and the solar-powered option allows the cameras to go virtually anywhere.

“We’ve given access to the local authorities. We don’t access the footage,” Nick explained. “It’s strictly the officers who have access and they can solve the crime. And they did in a couple of instances.”

License plate reader technology pairs with neighborhood residents’ video doorbells

“Since we installed the Flock system, we had a carjacking. A video doorbell caught the incident on camera. You could see the carjacking and the suspects pull out with the car; but you couldn’t see the license plate of the suspect’s vehicle,” Nick said. The police utilized both the video doorbell footage and Flock Safety’s license plate-reading capabilities to solve that crime.

Later, the Westfield HOA neighborhood had another incident with a stolen vehicle where a video doorbell captured the crime but not the license plate. When the stolen vehicle entered the neighborhood across the street, which is equipped with Flock Safety license plate readers, “the police knew the suspects left our neighborhood, and then found that they’d entered the next neighborhood. Because of Flock Safety, they arrested the person who stole that truck,” Nick said.

“The number one reason I ran for the HOA board was security. To me that was important,” Nick said. “The fact is that since we’ve gotten Flock Safety, we’ve seen a dramatic decrease in criminal activity.”

Nick is continuing to serve his community, recommending Flock Safety to other neighborhoods like his

After living in Katy, TX for over 35 years, Nick has just begun his second term with the HOA, his first as HOA president.

“I joined the board to increase the safety of our neighborhood, and I’ve done my job,” he said. Flock Safety license plate reading technology made it easier, Nick said, for him to do that job.

Watch Nick’s full story here: watch the video

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