Kelsey Canfield discovered an unsettling site at her Portland, OR house when she came home from school last Friday. Her garage door had been smashed in and her family's house had been robbed. Gone were laptops, cell phones, DVDS, jewelry, iPods, and other goodies - about $5,000 worth of items in total. After the dust had settled, the family began to ask what exactly had happened, and who could have done such a thing? In random burglaries like this, finding a suspect isn't always easy.
Home surveillance in the UK is on the rise. With its citizens already holding the status of most-recorded people in the world, Britons and Scots have turned to household security cameras with hopes that IP cameras placed around their house will work as well as the myriad of security cameras that record them when in public places.
It all started in December - random gun shots fired around the Gable Oaks neighborhood (in Columbia, SC) entered an apartment building and killed a 32-year old woman in her sleep. Shootings have continued - some bullets penetrating the walls of more residences, leaving residents petrified of leaving the inner sanctums of their homes - let alone going outside. City council members and the Gable Oaks tenant association believe the situation is at its boiling point, and have proposed the installation of several neighborhood security cameras to help combat the shots.
Usually we think of hidden cameras as being squirreld away in buttonholes and cleverly placed in newspapers and briefcases during high-stakes criminal investigations or by spies trying to crack open state secrets. Not so in Philadelphia. THe city has recently announced the introduction of mobile covert surveillance cameras to help control the city's rampant problems with illegal dumping.
Last year, members of Denmark's Hojstrup Housing Association decided the time had come to crack down on theft and vandalism. Sadly, such acts were a common problem throughout the housing area, often resulting in hefty repair costs. In an effort to cut down on these problems, and to create a safer environment overall, the association voted to move forward with an IP-based video surveillance project that would incorporate network cameras and Milestone XProtect Enterprise video management software. Today, 120 IP cameras monitor the properties, while authorized users can access both live and recorded footage from remote locations.