Category Archives: Video Security and Surveillance

Video surveillance is increasingly becoming a key component of any business security strategy. A business security video surveillance system can play multiple roles when it comes to protecting your company’s assets, including:

• Reducing employee theft
• Documenting break-ins or vandalism
• Providing a chain of evidence when investigating accidents
• Reducing insurance premiums.

Not all business security systems are created equal, however. In fact, in order to fully benefit from the protection of video surveillance, it is necessary to make sure that the system you order matches your particular needs.

Preventing employee theft used to only involve stopping a worker from walking out with your goods or helping himself to the money in the cash register. Take, for example, a recent incident at the Home Depot in Watertown, Mass., as reported in the Watertown Patch.

Home Depot security officers, who suspected an employee of stealing, caught him allegedly grabbing a $100 bill from the register and putting it in his apron. After he was arrested, the suspect admitted to taking approximately $5,000 in cash over five or six weeks.

While this type of theft still clearly occurs, times have changed, and employees have turned to more sophisticated ways to steal everything from merchandise to data from their employers.

Here are a few old school and cutting-edge ways to prevent your employees from stealing from your business;

If you think your car is safe parked in your own driveway – think again.

Recently, a man in Waltham, Massachusetts was arrested for allegedly trying to steal another car and its contents, according to the Waltham Patch.

Police arrested the man after they caught him fiddling around under the dashboard of a car while it was parked in the driveway of a home — and this car was allegedly not his only target. Waltham Police Sgt. Joseph Guigno credits ”good old fashioned police work” in apprehending this man — but what steps could have been taken to catch this criminal sooner?

Spring vacation is just around the corner, and keeping your home safe and secure is a full-time job no matter how far away your travels might take you. Just because you are on vacation doesn’t mean that local thieves and burglars have also decided to take some time off — in fact, a significant number of houses are targeted because their owners are out of the area and they have been marked as an easy score.

Don’t worry — there are a number of ways you can make your home a less appealing choice for burglars even when you can’t be around. Let’s take a look at a few easy ways to keep thieves from ruining your relaxed state of mind after you’ve come home from vacation.

Below we outline our top 3 tips to keep your home safe while on vacation:

The importance of installing a home video security system was highlighted recently as a UPS driver was caught stealing a package from a customer’s door step. The driver made his delivery and left with a package sent earlier by another carrier. Luckily, the front and back doors were secured with video surveillance systems, catching the thief in the act.

As you watch the video proof below, know that the front and back doors are crucial places to set up residential video surveillance systems. With cameras positioned in these high-traffic areas, thieves are deterred and any intruders will be visible and captured on the surveillance system as evidence. With modern technology, video security systems can be accessed remotely, ensuring you’re always in the loop. Stay tuned for a follow-up blog post on how you can further protect yourself when packages are delivered by a carrier.

Crime doesn’t take a break for the holidays.

In fact, statistics show most burglaries are residential (74.5% of all burglaries in 2011, according to the FBI), and incidences of these crimes spike during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. The fact that people are away from home, coupled with a struggling economy and the desire for money for holiday shopping, contribute to the increase in property crimes.

That’s why we at American Alarm encourage you to take extra steps to ensure your home is secure during the holiday season, particularly if you’re traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday.

In 2010, shoplifting accounted for 31% of retail inventory loss, according to a University of Florida retail security survey. This loss cost retailers about $10.94 billion during that year, according to a Washington Post article about the survey.

Items most commonly stolen include clothing, books, music, jewelry, watches, tires and car parts. “Everyone thinks about little Johnny stealing a pack of bubble gum, but there are also professional gangs that target stores and steal billions of dollars every year,” says Joseph LaRocca, an adviser for the National Retail Federation, in the article.

A break-in is one of a homeowner’s worst nightmares. Arriving home to find your belongings strewn across the floor and your valuables missing can leave you feeling afraid and angry. It shatters your sense of security. Also, it might take a long time – if at all – before you ever feel safe in your home again.

Take a look at recent police incident reports. Including ones right in your town. They are featured on the Police and Fire Logs posted in many places including Patch.com. You’ll see many reports of home break-ins.

In just one week, police in Easton, MA received calls about an individual who broke into a garage and stole a wallet from a vehicle as well as another thief who broke into a house and stole a video game system. In late August, three separate break-ins were reported, two occurred in the afternoon and the third in the early evening.

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2010 there were approximately 2,159,878 burglaries – 60.5% of those burglaries involved forcible entry. Residential property burglaries accounted for 73.9% of all offenses.

Is your burglar alarm system programmed with a communication timer test?

Just ask officials at the Siskiyou County Courthouse in California, who were shocked to discover that the failure of the security system protecting $3 million in gold resulted in a clean getaway for the thieves who simply smashed a hole in the glass case protecting the historical artifacts and grabbed everything they could.

The gold nuggets had been a theft target once before in 1979, when the silent alarm functioned as intended and the would-be marauders were apprehended roughly a block away from the courthouse with the illicit wares in their possession. This time, however, the vibration alarm that was meant to protect the irreplaceable gold nuggets – some of which date back to the town’s founding – did not respond at all. A town spokesperson stated that the system had been properly armed, and that the county was working with its security provider to get to the bottom of the glitch.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of the sad story surrounding the Siskiyou gold is a footnote at the bottom of the article that mentions an annual security alarm test schedule. According to the Courthouse, the last test occurred in August of 2011, nearly seven months before the February theft.

There is an important lesson that business and property owners can learn from the tragic tale of the Siskiyou theft, and that is that it’s not enough to rely on a single alarm system test every 12 months. So much can happen within a year’s time, especially in a heavily-trafficked space such as a courthouse or a retail space, that it really becomes necessary to perform an alarm system test at least once per quarter, if not once per month.

American Alarm programs a timer test with its business security systems that can send communications weekly or daily, depending on the type of signals being monitored. If our central station operators do not receive a signal, we contact the owner immediately to determine the cause of the missed communication, and find a solution to the issue.

It costs nothing to make sure that your alarm system is functioning up to spec – what’s  the price tag of not knowing? In the case of Siskiyou County, the figure would seem to be $3 million.