Good News and Bad News in a Liverpool Burglary Bust
The Good News (HT Interested-Participant):
A man from the Dallas area – 4,590 miles away – contacted police in the northern English town early Tuesday morning (Liverpool time) to report a burglary in progress. The international cyber sleuth was watching a webcam broadcast of Mathew Street in the famed Beatles quarter when he spotted three men breaking into a sporting goods store.
City officials trained on-street cameras on the site as the blaggers bolted with thousands of dollars in clothing toward a getaway car. Bobbies dashed to the scene and arrested them “fairly sharpish,” city officials said.
The incident made the front page Friday in the Liverpool Echo newspaper. In the article, headlined “Nicked on the Net,” a police inspector told reporter Luke Traynor: “We were amazed when we were informed the person who reported the offence lived in the USA.”
Police caught the crooks, but they didn’t catch the tipster’s name.
The Bad News, as I-P notes:
….. police officers in Liverpool weren’t monitoring the surveillance cameras. In most cases, I believe that surveillance camera footage provides evidence to convict criminals rather than to catch them in the act. Simple manpower constraints make it so.
Despite this unique success, it shows that cameras, despite being sold to city governments as crime prevention devices, are usually at best after-the fact detective measures that can be foiled if they aren’t pointed in the right direction, or if criminals are smart enough to wear masks and to take other concealment measures.
