Watching Live PD tonight and they gave info on a bank robbery suspect still on the loose. All of the pictures of the robber were from a high angle security camera, and in every photo the guy’s baseball cap hid his face.
Why don’t they have cameras at head level looking directly at whoever is at the teller’s window so we can see who they are? All I can tell from their alert is anyone wearing a baseball cap is a suspect, which isn’t exactly useful.
My understanding of the situation is that it is often difficult to make surveillance camera float in mid-air.
Perhaps you’ve heard of a recent invention called a “wall”. It sits between the floor and the ceiling and allows a camera to be fixed at any height without having to float.
I wonder if it’s to put their non-criminal clients at ease.
As in, nobody likes being watched, and having a camera in your obviously in your face is uncomfortable. The self-checkout at the target near my house has them about six inches away from the screen, and I don’t use them because it weirds me out.
Also, many times the camera is less to catch the criminal that poses as a customer, and more to catch the teller that decides to pocket a bill or two.
I want to know this also. And why are there not very clear video recordings? They are almost always very grainy and dark. Every person and their dog has a cellphone camera, they take very good pix and videos. Why is this tech not available to security companys?
Yeah, but those are commonly looking straight down at the till. Cameras now are housed in black hemispheres so you don’t know where they are looking. Don’t see why you couldn’t do that on the back wall. Or have a small, unobtrusive camera like a webcam right at the teller’s station.
I am familiar with this innovation. But I don’t think it would be aesthetically pleasing to place one between the teller and the customer in order to mount a camera. Marketing has silly ideas about patrons being able to see who they’re talking to.
Who face level would that be ? You have people of all difference height going into a bank . Maybe one day there will a robotic camera that will adjust to people height with an electric eye . Is the ‘wall’ camera able to adjust itself according to people height ?
You can place a wall behind the teller. Just a thought. Kinda like they do now.
Most banks I’ve been to recently do have a wall between the teller and customer. It’s made of bullet-resistant glass and has a grille so the teller and customer can talk to each other and a slot for passing papers like deposit slips and currency back and forth. I’m sure it prevents all but the most determined and organized criminals from attempting to rob the bank.
It doesn’t have to be at the exact height of the patron. Get the camera 6 feet off the ground and you’ll have much better view of the patron than having a camera mounted high on the wall.
And that puts teller between the camera and the robber, obscuring the view.
You know you can angle the camera off to the side, right?
Here’s how to do it. It’s not that hard.
Still have Beckdawrek’s point of poor image quality. I figure that’s a data storage and let’s-go-with-the-lowest-bidder problem.
My understanding of the situation is that transparent bank tellers have not yet been invented.
(Maybe after we get flying cars and nuclear fusion, tho.)
Banks could certainly do this.
They could install small, unobtrusive high-quality cameras at each teller counter, aimed upward toward the area where a robber’s face would be. (Though a lot of robbers wear masks, false beards, etc. to disguise their face.) And they could add the data storage capacity to handle this increased data load. And hire the additional help to search through it when needed. (Most requests would be not from robberies, but from id theft, fraud, forgery investigations.)
But why should banks spend money on this?
What is the cost/benefit for the bank?
So bank robbery is really just a minor cost of doing business for them; why should they spend money on preventing it?
When they could make more profits spending that same money on advertising to get new customers?
I can answer this one. It’s all about storage and bandwidth. COlor video takes up 8-32x as much space as black and white. Also, resolution increase storage requirements exponentially (2x the resolution is 4x the storage size). Finally, your typical bank will have multiple cameras (including ones in non-customer areas) and the video from all of those needs to be kept for several days.
A typical DVD (at standard resolution) can fit 2 - 3 hours in ~9 GB, and that’s with after compression. So, every day your bank would be producing 72 GB of data PER CAMERA. Yes, there’s audio in there as well, but that’s probably going to be less than a gig. Sure, storage is cheap these days, but at that rate,you’d be filling up an entire hdd every few days.
I’m also going to vote for technological progress. The banks were the first to put in video recording, and it wasn’t very good, and they probably only upgrade when they have to. So the have the oldest, crappiest tech generally. Today video resolution, network speed and disk size have grown dramatically.
My wife works at a store that recently underwent renovations. at the time, they replaced crappy 350 by 400 cameras with a set of state-of-the-art cameras. one is a dome camera on the ceiling that captures a 360º view. On the control software, you can select the interval, define an area, and it will play a fairly high resolution view of the selected area. This is light years (parsecs, even) ahead of where they previously were, based on 10 or 15 year old tech.
Why crappy resolution and up high? Down lower, on the far wall, the camera would have to be more precisely aimed and instead of covering a whole area, they’d need one for every teller. Unless the camera can see over every teller, a camera aimed at one customer would not be able to see the other teller’s customer. But… cover a wide angle and the detail at each teller window is crappier…
But t-bonham has it right. What’s the incentive. They already do the necessary minimum. They won’t improve until they really need to.
I also think you probably don’t want cameras that can easily pick up check numbers, signatures, and other personal information.
There’s also the fact or maintenance & reliability.
Last year, 4% of camera systems failed to work during a robbery. Similarly, 4% of alarm systems didn’t work to sound an alarm. And the electronic trackers hidden in bait money failed to work 9% of the time.
The more devices the bank spends money on to foil bank robberies, the more money they have to spend to keep them in working order. And clearly, that doesn’t always happen.
Most of the banks I’ve seen do, in fact, have a camera pointed at each teller station. They are mounted high on the far wall behind the teller.
I think if the cameras were lower, there would be a much greater chance that anyone standing between the “perp” and the camera would block the view. Having the camera high up allows it to see over everybody’s head, so that everybody is in line of sight of the camera in the direction it’s pointing. Of course, by the same token, it tends to only see the tops of the perps’ baseball cap visors.