April 9, 2007
Digital technology bringing video surveillance to the home-front
Digital video surveillance systems are becoming increasingly popular for home owners. They're portable, easy to operate, and many new systems come at an affordable price. Quality home surveillance systems can cost as low as $300 and only take about 30 minutes to install. These systems are used for everything from monitoring babysitters to capturing footage of vandalism and theft as it happens.
Russell Ricca of Bartonville, Ill. recently outfitted his house with a pair of $200 security cameras. He wanted to keep an eye out for neighborhood vandals who were consistently tossing trash into his yard and damaging his property. Russel's cameras are motion sensitive and use infrared technology to operate at night. He monitors feeds from the cameras on his computer and uses a video capture card to store the footage on his hard-drive.
Russell strategically placed the cameras in plane view. While he certainly wanted to catch the vandals in the act, he was more interested in completely deterring them from further inappropriate activity.
Turns out, the cameras aided in capturing an entirely different group of crooks who broke into his neighbor's car across the street. The entire incident, which involved the stealing of stereo equipment, was captured in its entirety by Russell's cameras. He burned footage of the incident in question onto DVD and handed it over to police who were able to identify the crooks thanks to clear images of the getaway car – a 1990s white Ford Escort that was missing its right front hubcap and right rear break light. Upon analyzing the video footage, police went to the Limestone Community High School parking lot and found the car in question, then nabbed the suspects before eventually recovering the stereo equipment.
Russell's case gives us a fine example of a low-cost home surveillance system proving effective as a crime fighting tool.
Posted by Dan on April 9, 2007 9:09 PM | Comments (0)
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