To identify the miscreant.
Police may a) recognize a repeat offender or b) publicize the perp’s image so that the general public can help identify him/her.
Wow. What kind of crime-free hamlet do you live in that the police would put out wanted posters for a mere burglary?
I’ve not seen wanted posters, I’ve seen pictures on TV and web sites.
Our counties and local towns often include stills of suspects in weekly newsletters to the neighborhoods.
Our local TV stations pick them up all the time, so it’s not unusual to see burglary suspects on TV almost every night around here.
Thanks for all the suggestions.
To answer some replies, I live in Thailand and cameras would not be a deterrent, I only put them in to identify the crims, which are probably local kids, should they be stupid enough to climb in without a mask.
I don’t think monitoring is even an option in the backwater where I live. Certainly the police won’t be turning up.
Wiring is inside the house, a big hammer drill and a long drill bit make that easy. My problem is that the cameras can be easily moved or covered.
Hiding the cameras in a bird cage or flowers would seem to be the best solution, thanks to those that suggested that.
Many house some sort of external flood lamps on their house - something that looks more for lighting a backyard so you can take out the garbage than for security purposes. The bulbs are pretty exposed and don’t look like anything special. A burglar may check to see if they light up from motion detection at night, but otherwise look like something that is just for lighting.
You can buy bulbs that screw into a standard socket that look like a regular glass bulb, but have a camera inside and transmit a signal to a remote receiver through the electrical wiring of the house. They even have infra-red built into them for night vision. A burglar would expect to see such lighting outside a house, and if it isn’t night, or the lamps don’t light up when tripped, would probably not think them to be anything more than a standard glass lamp.
A camera out in the open that doesn’t look like a camera, but does look like something that is normally there anyway.
And the authorities would pick them up on the basis of your images?
I take it that you don’t know Thailand!
More likely what would happen is that if we could identify the culprits to the locals, and they knew them, a bit of “social justice” would occur.
These crims aren’t just stealing from me.
Are the laws regarding lethal booby traps more …greasy or perhaps abesnt than here in the US?
They can also be tuned to know how many ‘pixels’ your dog is on the sensor.
If you have a competent alarm integrator, they may even be able to set the alarm so that it knows what size dog you have.
You can actually get cameras with a bunch of tiny IR LEDs on them for as little as $50 if you want. Bright light is a great deterrent, of course, and I’d suggest it.
A visual and audio deterrent, if you can avoid annoying the neighbors with falses, is probably a much better idea than the cameras themselves. You don’t have to stop the bad guys, you just have to make them choose nextdoor.
That wouldn’t work for me. Although I am by no means rich in a western sense, where I live, I’m the rich guy, and the neighbours don’t have anything worth stealing.
One time, they even stole the yoghurt out of my fridge.
The consequences of using a booby trap would depend on how much money I have to pay off the relevant people.
If I was really rich, I could just pay someone to shoot them, but that isn’t an option I can afford.