Among its other effects, COVID-19 is fueling the growth of online retail purchasing in New England. This means more deliveries of goods to the home, which in turn creates more opportunities for parcel thieves.
Criminals can just grab a package from the doorstep in broad daylight and vanish, without needing to break in. To combat this threat, online customers can leverage proven surveillance and high-tech solutions to catch or frustrate these criminals.
How to Disguise Home Security Cameras
Approximately 67% of all burglaries occurring in the United States target residential properties. This results in nearly 3.5 billion dollars in homeowner property losses each year. Of those burglaries, 15% occur in homes in the Northeast, and nearly half of those take place while the resident is at home.
This makes security cameras a very important tool for both the safety of the home and the homeowner. Yet, an effective camera isn’t enough. You also need effective camera placement.
In some cases you may not want your cameras right out in the open where they can be tampered with. Instead, you want to ensure that they are well hidden, yet still placed in prime position to capture any would-be intruder.
Here are a few great places to hide your indoor and outdoor cameras to ensure that they are as useful as possible while remaining undamaged by potential burglars.
Keep Spider Webs, Bugs or Insects From Security Cameras
High resolution surveillance cameras are key tools in protecting our New England homes and businesses from thieves and intruders. However, as reliable and proven as these solutions are, they require maintenance — and that includes preventing the camera lenses from being obscured by such obstructions as spider webs or insect nests.
Spider and insect interference may be a bigger problem than you might realize, particularly for homeowners with exterior camera-based security systems. Spiders do in fact habitually spin webs across lenses, as this industry blogs notes. This can create blind spots in your surveillance system, in effect disabling it.
Depending on your state, county, city or town, your child may be returning soon to the classroom. With the threat of COVID-19 remaining here in New England, you’ll want to take the best approach to ensure your child’s safety in and outside the school or playground.
The challenges for successful reopening and education are considerable, as a Mayo Clinic article on the subject notes. It states, “As schools reopen, they must balance the educational, social and emotional needs of their students along with the health and safety of students and staff in the midst of the evolving COVID-19 pandemic.”
The average person spends ten minutes per day looking for a lost item. That’s nearly 2.5 days per year spent trying to retrieve glasses, keys, wallets, and other valuables that have slipped out of sight.
What’s more, Americans spend over 2.7 billion dollars per year in replacement costs for lost goods. Yet, in 2020, there’s no need to waste money replacing what’s been lost. Here are several technology tools you can use to ensure that you always keep track of your most valuable possessions.
Every New England home or business owner wants to protect their property from burglars. Such invaders are a real threat today. According to the FBI, in 2018, the most recent full year with available statistics, there were 1.2 million burglaries in the United States. This represents some 17 percent of all property crime.
Naturally, you can take basic steps to defend yourself, such as locking doors and windows when you are absent, alerting neighbors if you are going on vacation, and so on. To take it a step further, however, try to think a bit like a burglar and develop your defensive strategies accordingly.
Roughly 250 New England homes out of every 100,000 are burglarized each year. Massachusetts residents alone have about a 1 in 79 chance of becoming the victim of a property crime.
If you want to ensure that you do not become part of that statistic, you’re not alone. Homeowners are looking for better ways to secure their property – that don’t come with a hefty price tag.
Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to achieve greater home security that don’t involve a lot of additional investment. Often, some creative thinking matched with wise decisions are all it takes to ensure that your home is safe from would-be intruders.
As a New England business owner or manager, you probably have questions about security that you weren’t sure how to ask. Here we have assembled a list of common, reasonable questions to help guide you in the future as you evaluate new (or existing) security solutions.
New England boasts the most well-educated workforce in the nation, yet productivity is still an issue – as it is everywhere in the United States. It is imperative for companies to find a way to increase employee engagement, and decrease stressors, pressures, and distractions that lead to a lack of productivity.
One of the best ways to do this is by implementing a stronger commercial security infrastructure. These added measures will fortify your business against wasted hours, employee distrust, and other productivity stealers. The following four tips show you how to use commercial security to increase productivity among your employees – across all areas of your business.
As a New England business owner, you may not think much about your various security and surveillance systems — until you need them. That means your existing solutions may have become outdated, suffer from gaps, or are just plainly obsolete and not fully functional.
It may be too late to address these security shortcomings by the time you realize them. This is most relevant in areas where the growth of new technology, such as the Internet of Things, is creating even more risk than before.
Is Your Security Ready?
With the arrival of COVID-19 and new safety and health regulations, businesses face a whole new set of challenges to protect their employees, customers and partners. As the Boston Herald notes, a failure in protection might lead to a crippling lawsuit that could financially ruin a small firm.
Members of your company, or your partners, may be working remotely in unfamiliar environments or conditions, as mentioned in a recent Boston Business Journal article. Your security procedures and solutions may be vulnerable, given they must function across geographically distributed locations, or at hours and in circumstances they weren’t designed for.
Protection Assessment and Evaluation
Given the current situation, here are five indicators to consider if you’re in doubt about how current and robust your current business security system is. You might want to consider an upgrade or revamp if:
If any or all of these situations applies to you, it’s worth considering a security upgrade. New surveillance and sensing systems can protect you and your business in this ever changing and challenging commercial environment.
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