To catch a delinquent

[Huskymaniac]

I think one of the neighborhood delinquents is f'in with my car. I have recently noticed odd scuffs, scrapes and gouges on my rear bumper as well as what seemed to be more dings in the doors than I could remember. The door dings could be your run of the mill idiots in parking lots. But the rear bumper stuff seemed very odd. The gouges are down to the black plastic and there are several of them scattered over the bumper.

I often park the car in the back of the driveway so my kids can play basketball. So I wondered if someone might be doing something to it as they walked down the street and especially at night. Tonight my wife asked me to move the cars back toward the house. When I went outside it was dark but I could swear I saw some movement on the road near my front yard. I moved one car and then I decided to drive the second car down the road to see what I could find. I saw a couple of flashlights moving up the driveway of one of my neighbors. This is home to a couple of little punks about the same age as my kids. Coincidence? Maybe.

What is interesting is that these kids are spoiled rotten. In particular, they have every motorized vehicle known to man. They have ATVs, motorcycles, motorized scooters, mopeds and seadoos and that is just the kids. The dad has more gas engined toys. They aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer and, recently, they have also slipped in the athletics pecking order. I wonder if maybe being the kings of gas engined vehicles was all they had left and felt theatened that someone had something unique (with a gas engine) they didn't.

I want to bait and nail them in the act. My idea is to grab an IR camera from work and connect it to my computer. I can illuminate the front yard with an invisible IR light source. I think there is software that will analyze video images and store clips any time it determines the image has changed significantly. I'm thinking of parking the car in the back of the driveway several days in a row to see if I can snag them.

Any suggestions on software or hardware I could use?