“Car Stolen” claims owner; but Intelligent CCTV shows NOT
Viseum UK’s Community SafetyWatch® Intelligent CCTV schemes are gathering pace throughout the UK. An example of this is a recent installation in London where it was installed and commissioned for a community by one of South London’s Largest Police Boroughs, within just a few hours, and within just a few days it captured an incident of a type that usually goes unnoticed, and could well be a major factor in why insurance policies and policing come at extremely high cost in the UK. In the dead of night a car driven by its owner hurtled around a corner near the Community SafetyWatch® CCTV scheme. The car overturned ending belly-up with the driver clambering out of the passenger seat and running off. As this event unfolded the Viseum camera managed to capture absolutely everything, even including clear identification and car number plates of witnesses, but more importantly it captured all the high quality close-up evidence of the crime that was needed, from all around the scheme.
As the driver initially ran off, the Viseum camera followed him running through the area and where he decided to make his getaway. He ran up an opposite road for a few hundred metres until he was almost out of sight, but amazingly he then turned round and ran all the way back, then climbed back into the car for a few seconds appearing as if he had forgotten something, and then frantically made his getaway yet again running up another road but with the Viseum camera still following him. Once again, he was almost out of sight but at this moment he slowed down and turned back but this time walking slowly and seeming to be wondering if he should give himself up. He then hid himself around a nearby corner to peer around it to see if anyone had turned up to deal with the crash. At this moment the Viseum camera zoomed into him capturing his high quality close-up identification.
After reviewing some of the video evidence of this event by officials, including recordings of the driver casually walking away from the scene after having given excellent clear CCTV images of himself, it was decided by local officials that he was probably the owner of the car and quite likely not going to own up to the offence, and even intending to commit insurance fraud. It was later revealed that this was in fact the case and during the course of this incident investigation, Viseum liaised with the Investigating Officers daily to assist them in producing an evidential package for the Crown Prosecution Service which enabled them to minimise the time taken by the court to have the owner admit to these incredible mistakes.
Community SafetyWatch® CCTV schemes are usually supported with very few Viseum cameras because they cover such large open space areas so effectively, which is the key factor in making these shared schemes economically feasible. This scheme was no exception with just one Viseum camera covering the whole area, operating completely automatically with no human intervention until the images were retrieved.
Notes to editors:
Following this example local police are deploying more Viseum cameras and this community is using the same example to justify cheaper premiums with their insurers. We at Viseum are committed to maintaining this level of expertise in the field of Intelligent CCTV remote monitoring.
