6 houses on my street in a nice area – 4 break ins in the last 2 weeks, including breaking into my garage by taking the roof off and stealing 2 bikes in broad daylight.
They did arrest someone yesterday for one of the break ins but then one of my neighbours had his car broken into last night.
So would CCTV be a good option for prevention or would it make the house/garage stand out more as a target?

Don’t think there’s any point in real CCTV, get some fake cameras instead.

Maybe a dog, or one of those things that makes a barking sound when it sense movement?

From experience of watching lots of CCTV coverage, I think it’s only worth it if it is a top notch system that provides a good clear picture.

Also you need to make sure that the area you are covering is really well lit at night, otherwise you’re just watching shadows.

Although the fact that their is a camera can put folks off along with having security lighting. You could just get some signs and a fake camera.

Rochdale= nice area = fail

As for the breakins i blame that school Waterloo road, no discipline there, teachers haveing sex with the pupils, then being blackmailed, Head a bit weird, looking into the distance, strange disfunctional teachers(well thats usual) and kids who dont swear.

BBC1 Now.

Cmeras are quite cheap from http://www.cpc.com, but you also need a recorder, and some security lights, try to hide the cameras, and the cables or get wireless ones.

I’m not sure about CCTV (great way to start giving advice, I know!). From your post, I take it that you’re talking about domestic use. I own 2 largish businesses operating out of 2 different premises (each building has around 22 rooms) so the security issues are a bit different. I decided to have CCTV professionally fitted after a single incident of minor vandalism one clear Summer’s evening. I had cameras fitted all around the premises (so that if it moved, it was filmed). All cameras were linked to a hard drive recording system. The problem we had was that we had so few incidents (one attempted break in in 15yrs) that when an attempt was made, the camera that would have had the best view wasn’t working and the image on a different camera wasn’t clear enough to be worthwhile. It was satisfying to be able to show to the police, but wasn’t a factor in catching the culprit. I can’t remember costs, and it would be impossible to translate to your situation, but it wasn’t cheap though. Not something I’d consider for domestic use, but better quality pictures (at the time). I would say if you’re having regular problems, then CCTV might be useful, but if you’re relying on it once in a blue moon, you’ll either have forgotten how to retrieve the pictures or find that it hasn’t recorded as well as you thought when you look to play back the pictures.
For domestic use, I’d go for a noisy dog first, backed up with good external lighting, strong locks (none are totally invincible if determined) and an alarm. Try to make it as noisy and awkward as possible for them to get to your stuff. If all else fails, back it up with good insurance. Easy in theory, but not cheap, I know. Not sure if the police still give security advice, but Mrs T had them round when we moved to our current house and the advice they gave was excellent and some of the suggestions they gave were relatively cheap and simple.

Personally I can’t be ar*ed with remembering to feed a dog or the paranoia, so I always have insurance which covers us new for old. The one time I was burgled, they stole a load of old crap and we got a load of new good stuff, did us a favour really.:)

Up until recently we had a motion-activated wireless webcam on our front door frame. I fitted it after some scumbag lifted several hundred quids’ worth of train tickets from our postbox (the tickets were international and useless without the corresponding named passenger passports, but it still caused all sorts of entertaining bother for me).

Last summer an opportunistic local career-criminal, whilst scoping out the roof-slates on some nearby sheds, noticed our house. He tried our front door on a whim, in broad daylight, whilst my wife was upstairs. The door happened to be unlocked, and said sub-simian shithead was able to saunter into the front room and pick up a nice, shiny, new Apple MacBook. My wife heard noises (presumably his knuckles scraping on the floor) and went to investigate. Fortunately the bloke was an abject coward as well as a dirty, theiving pissbiscuit, and he legged it before discovering that the only person in our fairly isolated house wasn’t a crazed farmer with a shotgun, but a woman in a dressing gown.

My wife locked the door and phoned the police straight off, who to their credit sent out loads of coppers very quickly. They dispatched a couple of panda cars which pootled aimlessly round the village for a bit, until I arrived and pointed out to the attending PC that not only did we have snaps of the offending Neanderthal tealeaf, but also that the mill through which he must have made his escape was equipped with several CCTV cameras. There was lots of evidence to go on. Police heaven, surely.

The bill took a look at the pictures our little web-cam had caught, and one copper claimed to recognise the bottom-feeding caveman of whom my camera had snapped a number of clear shots. The idiot had practically smiled for the camera whilst trying to unplug it. It was shaping up to be a perfect case, enabling the rozzers to nab a known felon with the minimum of effort. They set off to apprehend the villain, picking up a stack of similarly incriminating CCTV footage from our nearest neighbours at the mill on the way.

But it’s never that simple is it? To cut a long and boring story short, ten months later, after much faffing by the CPS, the case was dismissed because the police hadn’t followed the correct identification procedures before arresting this startlingly inept burglar, and he got off without adding further to the considerable number of stains on his character.

Moral: CCTV evidence is only as good as the legal system that tests it, and legal systems are frustratingly fallible. Don’t expect technology to save you from even the stupidest of burglars, wire your bike into the mains electric instead. 😉

Moral of the above story…you need to be the crazed farmer with a shotgun.

wire your bike into the mains electric instead.

Other Aberdonians may remember the newspaper story about a Mastrick loon who wired up the handle of his shed to the mains. He’d been broken into several times over the course of a few months and was at his wits’ end.

The very next day, some theiving swine ignored all the signage and tried the handle. Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, etc.

The owner of the shed was imprisoned and the theif survived to rob another day.

Buy a dog.

apologies wrong linky should have been

http://WWW.CPC.CO.UK

We used it in an attempt to catch some theives who were repeatedly nicking stuff from our farm. We used a couple of cheapy cameras – the “night vision” was useless, so we tried sticking up a security lamp to provide lighting. The exposure adjustment was useless, so that just resulted in whiteout. The cameras were pretty good in daylight, but that wasn’t when stuff was getting nicked.

The moral of the story was that you need to spend serious money to get a worthwhile system. I’d rather spend it on physical security and fog machines if at all possible. In our case it wasn’t, as a farm’s a rather large thing to stick a 8 foot fence around.

The owner of the shed was imprisoned and the theif survived to rob another day.

Ah. I’d better go and unplug the bike then.

I do feel that CCTV is overkill in some way especially as we already have a comprehensive alarm system, decent locks and new for old insurance. I just hate the idea that these little scrotes can get away with what they do.
My wife has arrived home on 2 occasions in the past 10 days to be confronted with i) Garage door wide open & our alarm going off – thieves has been gone less than 6 minutes by my calcs, and ii) Our neighbours alarm going off and the little shits still in the house removing a 50″ telly from the wall. Wish it had been me and not her!
Don’t know why it’s happened all of a sudden – There have only been 2 minor incidents on the street in 120 years the last of which was over 5 years ago.

Project – Thx for the link – won’t bite on your first comment though! 😉

Get an A1K9. 😀

Land mines??

Albino, CPC are in Preston not to far away and they have a cctv room where the cameras are on display , so you can check them out.

The first bit was meant as a joke, as i would love to live round Tod Or Rochdale

Sadly thieves do return to burgled properties as they know whats there to nick and their way around.