CCTV systems and crime issues

May 29, 2018 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
Given the crime situation many people are investing their hard earned money for some sort of protection. One of the most comforting means for them is security cameras.
Now a lot of unscrupulous people are obtaining outdated/condemned CCTV systems from overseas and selling people at exorbitant fees, and these systems are not providing the proper service as expected.
Some of these dishonest people are using footage from other systems and even from what makes the news, and promoting themselves on social media as if the system they are selling is responsible.
While they cannot be charged for false promotion, their unsuspecting victims’ money is being wasted, because they eventually have to buy a new system after not getting the service from the waste they purchased. Quite a few people have been scammed and l bluntly told them after I was asked to look at their system after they encountered problems.
A while back I penned a series of letters advising in the type of system and camera they should look for and settings for their systems to help get better footage.
Recently a woman’s shop was broken into at Zeelugt – early on a Wednesday night and again three days after, on Saturday. A few weeks after they again broke in to the shop and each time she suffered great losses.
The woman had a security system installed, but they couldn’t locate the footage on the DVR, so they called me after the first two times. I went and was able to locate the footage which showed four boys committing the crime. From the footage we couldn’t identify any of the criminals properly, so no one was charged.
The reason for that was because the cameras were not properly set and the lighting was bad. On my advice, she allowed me to rearrange the cameras and lights, and she was quite pleased with the results.
The footage was hard to locate because the CMOS battery had gone bad in the DVR thus, every time the DVR is switched off or there is a blackout, the DVR goes back to the manufacturer’s timing and starts recording. So what you have is a DVR with multiple footage of same dates and timings all over the hard drive.
One way to eradicate that problem is if you notice your DVR timing/date going back to the default settings or DVR malfunctioning, chances are the CMOS battery is bad and should be changed immediately, because definitely you would encounter problems when you try to retrieve footage.
These are simple problems, but apparently many so-called experts cannot solve this minor problem. Many are setting cameras in such a way that make it impossible to capture any face properly if that person is wearing a cap. Criminals are becoming wary of cameras and people should explore the possibilities of installing cameras and concealing them. Security system installation has many issues to deal with but as I listed, these are some of the main fixes which I hope would help people.
Sahadeo Bates

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