You’re walking down the street. Someone jumps out from behind a wall, grabs your purse and takes off. Time to cancel the credit cards and get a new purse? Perhaps not. A Portland, Ore.-based company that specializes in video surveillance solutions has just launched an online crowdsourced mapping tool in Boulder County that could help victims of crime track down perpetrators and bring them to justice.

The tool is called CommunityCam, and it allows people to map online where surveillance cameras are located in a given area. Victims can visit the map — at videosurveillance.com/communitycam — to see if there was a camera in the immediate area where the crime was committed, be it a mugging or a hit-and-run.

They can then request that police try to obtain any footage captured. “We’re seeing this as a community-based safety initiative that is being embraced because of the shortfalls in law enforcement budgets,” said Josh Daniels, founder of CommunityCam and president of VideoSurveillance.com.

“Most of the cameras out there have been in place for years, and people simply don’t know that they are out there.” So far, 32 cameras in Boulder have been plotted on CommunityCam, with another 500 or so mapped in the Denver area. The first city to go online was Philadelphia, late last year. The Denver metro area went live last month.

CommunityCam is also operating in San Francisco, Portland, Ore., Oakland, Chicago and Orange County, Calif. Daniels estimates that about 10,000 surveillance cameras have been mapped […]