After being robbed you have a very violated feeling. You’ve lost that sense of security and privacy. You want to catch the person who did it, you want the person or persons to be held accountable for what they did. The only problem is no one will feel as strongly about this as you do. The police can only do so much, they see theft and robbery daily. They are not staffed enough to assign a team of investigators working around the clock on your case. Even though this is exactly what we want after a robbery, it’s just not a possibility.
I was the victim of a not one, but two robberies. Once in at a business and once in a hotel room.
The business robbery the person was caught red-handed by police just doing a routine check. They caught the guy with several thousand dollars worth of products and he was still loading more when the police came by. He tried to explain to police that I had given him permission to be there. He was charged with breaking and entering, robbery, and driving under the influence. I showed up at the business at 3am to meet police and secure the building. It felt great that the person was caught red-handed by police. It was the perfect ending to a bad situation. But the feeling of being violated and not secure took over the next day. I immediately reinforced the back door with a 4″ X 4″ thick post and two huge metal brackets to rest the wood in at the end of the night. It was way overkill but it helped to restore the secure feeling. I didn’t think about anything else because the guy was caught.
The second robbery was at a hotel room in Daytona Beach Florida. It was the first time I ever left New England. I always wanted to take my kids to Florida but never had enough money. I decided I would get a credit card and charge the entire trip, worry about paying it back later. I drove my pickup from New Hampshire to Daytona Beach. My kids, my wife, and my sister-in-law took a plane the following day. The plan was I was going to meet them at the airport in Orlando FL. On my way I stopped in Stony Creek Virginia to rest for the night. I stayed at a hotel on the side of I-95, leaving a lot of things in the back of my truck, but worried someone would steal the stuff while I was sleeping. Not that Stony Creek is a bad town, its beautiful actually. I just knew that it could be an easy opportunity for someone. To my relief everything was there when I woke up the next morning. I continued my journey to Daytona Beach well rested. When I arrived at the Daytona Beach hotel I immediately took everything out of my truck and brought it into the hotel room since we were going to be there for the week and I would need the room in the truck to pick everyone up. The next day I woke up to go to the airport only to hear the connecting flight in Washington was delayed due to a mechanical issue. When the plane finally landed in Orlando I drove the hour to pick them up and bring them back to the hotel room. We decided to go out to dinner that night across the street. We were only gone an hour or so. We returned to the room and continued our conversation. I happened to notice my laptop wasn’t where I left it. I thought it fell on the floor. When I went to find it I noticed it was gone. We began looking around and noticed we were missing our cameras, GPS, and a few other things. Oddly enough our small handheld cooler was also missing. It didn’t take long to realize we were robbed and someone put all of our stuff in the cooler so it wouldn’t look suspicious and left. I immediately got everyone out of the room in case the person was still there and called the police. I also called the hotel manager who was upset with me because I wanted to see the security camera images. He was grocery shopping and thought being robbed wasn’t a priority. After a heated discussion he agreed to come to the hotel where he was ready for a physical altercation with me. The police stepped in and separated us. I finally got to see the security videos. The quality was so bad I couldn’t even tell who was carrying the cooler. The person was carrying something the same size as the cooler, but it was too fuzzy and grainy to tell exactly what it was. After the police left we asked to be moved to another room because we felt so violated and the kids were scared. The look on their faces will forever haunt me. The big Florida vacation we wanted so badly was ruined. The next day I found the cooler in a garbage can on the beach. I called the police back to the beach in front of the hotel and they bagged it as evidence. When the cooler was placed in the evidence room at the police station some of the officers thought it was a joke and were playing with it, destroying any fingerprint evidence. The police did tell me that there were a few people in town they thought it could have been but without quality security video to identify the person(s) there was no way of knowing for sure. Because of the poor quality of the security cameras no one was never charged with this crime.
Since then, I have made security a top priority. Its the places you feel the safest that you are most vulnerable. These are the places that need quality security camera surveillance systems.
This is where my passion for quality security cameras comes from. Before you become a helpless victim wishing you had done more be sure you have security measures in place, including quality video cameras, they can really be a game changer. Security cameras can provide identifying evidence that can be used in court to convict a criminal who broke into your property. The video may also provide a direction of travel, a vehicle description, and license plate number. In addition, the presence of a security camera will deter most criminals.