Dear Editor,

There are many reasons available for blaming the crime situation and many people are investing their hard earn money for some sort of protection. One of the most comforting means for them is security cameras. Now a lot of unscrupulous people are obtaining outdated/condemned CCTV systems from overseas and selling people at exorbitant fees and these systems are not providing the proper service as expected. Some of these dishonest people are using footage from other systems and even from what makes the news, and are promoting themselves on social media as if the system they are selling is responsible.

While they cannot be charged for false promotion, these unsuspecting victims’ money is being wasted because they eventually have to buy new systems while not getting the service from the waste they purchase. Quite a few people have been scammed and l bluntly told them after I was asked to look at their system after they encounter problems.
A while back, I penned a series of letters advising on the type of system and camera one should look for and the setting for their system, to help get better footage.
Editor, recently a woman’s shop was broken into at Zeelugt early one Wednesday night and again three days after, the Saturday night. A few weeks after, the [business] was broken into again and each time she suffered great losses. Now she [the woman] had a security system installed but they couldn’t locate the footage on the DVR so they call me after the first two times. I went and was able to locate the footage which shows four boys committing the crime. The footage, however, couldn’t identify any of the criminals properly so no one was charged. The result of that was because the cameras were not properly set up and the lightening was bad.

On my advice she allowed me to rearrange the cameras and lights and was quite pleased with the results afterwards. The footage was hard to locate because the CMOS battery had gone bad in the DVR, thus, every time the DVR is switched off or there is a blackout, the DVR goes back to the manufacturing timing and starts recording. So what you have is a DVR with multiple footage of same dates and timings all over the hard drive. One way to eradicate that problem is, if you notice your DVR timing/date going back to the default settings or DVR malfunctioning, chances are that the CMOS battery is bad and should be changed immediately because definitely you would encounter problems when you try to retrieve footage.

These are simple problems but apparently many so-called experts cannot solve this minor problem. Criminals are becoming weary of cameras and people should explore the possibilities of installing cameras and concealing them. Security system installations have many issues to deal with but as I listed, these are some of the main faults which I hope would help people.

Regards,

Sahadeo Bates