yeah my personal view is that these cameras do nothing except widen police surveillance capacity but I'm somewhat interested in what the people who buy them think they are doing.
I expect people who buy them haven't personally witnessed what it looks like to report property crime—even fairly major property crime—to the police. Which is to say, they don't realize that there's almost no chance they'll do anything about it at all except issue a report for insurance (if you want one, and probably for a fee just to add insult to injury) even if you come to them with all kinds of evidence, up to and including clear video of faces and license plates. They probably imagine it going very differently from how it actually goes.
My personal experience from a home invasion where the individual caused a not insignificant amount of damage to the home resulted in nothing more than the police merely filing in a form and handing me a receipt.
My personal experience from coming home to a burgled also ended with the same situation. The police came, waited from crime lab to take prints, prints were not recoverable, no follow up. This was even after several attempts at providing the assigned detective detailed information from the bank on how the criminal's attempted to use a stolen checkbook to withdraw money from a bank account. The detective later explained that he's too busy to look at information provided via email.
Yep. I've seen (and personally experienced) individuals and small businesses suffer property crime ranging from low thousands to upper five figures. Not once has any amount of evidence, including the aforementioned faces-and-license-plates video evidence, or in another case multiple credit card transactions at places that assuredly have cameras covering both the register and parking lot (and at least once at a hotel, which means they made a copy of an ID, even though it may have been fake), convinced the cops to do anything whatsoever aside from offer to issue a report for insurance (for a fee, the assholes). I've even seen a case of this plainly being an ongoing spree with video placing the same people and vehicles multiple places. Cops didn't care, even though the criminals were still working and hitting places every day or two.
Middle-class white people in every case, just to eliminate any race angle. Maybe richer folks have a better time, IDK. This isn't even the allegedly-lawless-hellhole of San Francisco or anything remotely like that.
Cops in my area did a sting operation to find out who was putting trash into one of the municipality's wealthy benefactor's trash bins at night. They also did a six month investigation to catch some high school kid who spray painted "BLM" on a street, but completely ignored whoever wrote "WLM 2" next to it the next day.
The police know who they work for, and they will expend all the resources they have to go after people they simply just don't like, no matter how petty the crime.
The crime lab said it was rare for them to make an appearance. He said if there had been a dead body, they'd have brought out all the toys to do forensics. I gently reminded him that I would have been the dead body in question, and the whole conversation was soured after that.
Alot of the footage is passed along on next door. People do connect the dots, eg they tell you where the guy who grabbed your package is camping, then you can try to go retrieve it yourself.
Personally, I was motivated to get a Ring camera after a couple instances of porch theft. In the years since it has never happened again. So there is some deterrent value.
I would never install a smart device INSIDE my home. But I don’t see why people are freaking out about door/driveway cameras.
I don't know, I don't live in a place with driveways so it's hard to say how I'd feel about them. Where I live these cameras all face the street and public sidewalk, a place I feel is adequately surveilled already.
Anyway I had a few packages thefts over a few years and did nothing about them at all. I haven't had any in about a year though so clearly it's working.
