Solar/ Wireless Site Cameras Support Law Enforcement with Effective Use of Cameras in Public Parking Lots

THE CHALLENGE

Capturing and documenting activity in public parking areas

Parking in the downtown and waterfront areas of Plymouth, Massachusetts is managed by the Plymouth Growth and Development Corporation. Park Plymouth is a group within this organization that handles the day-to-day duties of managing paid, time-limited, and free parking in public parking lots and in public on-street spaces.

Plymouth, Massachusetts is a popular tourist town visited by thousands of families who come to see historic sites and by thousands of people who patronize shops and restaurants during regular business hours. In addition, Plymouth has quite a number of restaurants and cafes that stay open late into the night. Occasionally, there are incidents where police are called to investigate.

Park Plymouth has installed Sensera MC-78 cameras in one of its busiest downtown surface lots. The cameras record images fairly frequently, and the police are able to ask that images recorded around the time of a recent incident be downloaded for them to review.

THE SOLUTION

Sensera cameras provide cost-effective monitoring and high-quality image recording

Park Plymouth found this to be a cost-effective and appropriate way to deal with incidents that occur relatively infrequently and are generally brought to the attention of the police by the public. The portable surveillance cameras provide a way to look back in time for visual corroboration of what may have occurred. Also, the mere presence of cameras in the parking lot serves as a passive deterrent since the cameras are always capturing images that can be reviewed if requested.

“We chose to use Sensera MC-78 cameras in this parking lot because they: 1) can be configured to capture high resolution images quite frequently and store several days worth of these images on the built-in digital video recorder, 2) are solar powered and therefore do not require running power cables to them, 3) have the option of being configured to run in cellular or wi-fi mode, 4) enable us to eliminate the cost of running the cameras in cellular mode by running them in wi-fi mode, 5) make it possible to use a wi-fi hotspot to retrieve images wirelessly without cellular costs, and 6) enable us to respond to police requests for images by taking the hotspot to the vicinity of a camera and downloading images from it. We have found the image quality to be exceptional. Overall, we think the highest resolution images from the MC-68 cameras provide more information at greater distances and under poorer lighting conditions than other camera systems we have considered.”

— Leighton Price President, Plymouth Growth & Development Corporation