Can a home surveillance camera system prevent crime? Often, this is a possibility. But criminals don’t usually just barge into a home with no planning at all. They do try to look for homes that are unprotected. There is another angle to this as well though.
When criminals do break into a house and commit a crime, it helps the police immensely to look at footage from home surveillance cameras in the home, to see how the criminals may be caught. Since there are cameras just about everywhere these days, both the police and victims have a good way of bringing the criminals to justice. Camera footage can also be an excellent way of proving one’s case in court.
For instance, there was a robbery at a bodega in New York recently. Armed robbers entered the store and held the owner hostage. When the police arrived, the store owner and his assistant ran out of the store to save themselves. The assistant didn’t really look where he was going in his hurry to escape.
He ran headlong into one of the police officers, causing the officer to accidentally discharge his weapon. The assistant died. His family decide to see the police when they looked at the surveillance camera footage the store had and decided that the officer was at fault. There are any number of these situations that a good surveillance camera set up can help with.
Security cameras are cheap today. At one time, you had to make do with only one or two cameras to cover a large area. You would use a camera that moved back and forth to cover everything. This was unsafe of course, because burglars could just time what they did to when the camera looked the other way. This isn’t necessary anymore, now that these cameras are cheap enough that you can place fixed cameras everywhere to cover a large area. This is an important mistake to avoid.
It can be a mistake to store your home surveillance camera footage on a DVR that’s right there in a prominent place. Motivated criminals can easily find a DVR when they enter a house and then destroy it. This is an important mistake to avoid, too – you should always put your DVR in a place where it cannot be found.
An analog home surveillance camera system can be a bad idea, even if it is cheaper. With analog, it’s easy for a burglar to just check to see what’s being transmitted inthe house. He can easily know that you have a security camera system, and know what exactly is recorded. It’s never a good idea to give away this much. Go digital, and things will be much better.
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