U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

NCJRS Virtual Library

The Virtual Library houses over 235,000 criminal justice resources, including all known OJP works.
Click here to search the NCJRS Virtual Library

Role of Alarms and CCTV in Detecting Non-Residential Burglary

NCJ Number
209910
Journal
Security Journal Volume: 18 Issue: 2 Dated: 2005 Pages: 53-72
Author(s)
Timothy Coupe; Satverg Kaur
Date Published
2005
Length
20 pages
Annotation
This study focused on the role of burglar alarms and closed-circuit television (CCTV) systems in the detection of nonresidential burglary.
Abstract
The research focused on burglaries committed between April and September 2000 in nine Operational Command Units of a British police force, which involved part of a major city and three industrial towns. The targeted area included a variety of nonresidential burglary targets. A sample of 1,117 cases was drawn from the 6,329 nonresidential burglaries committed over the study period. Officers first at the scene and officers who subsequently worked on the cases completed 1,008 questionnaires that dealt with the initial police response and the case outcome. A subset of burglary incidents was randomly selected from the 1,008 cases in which data had been collected in the surveys. For this subset, victim and burglary site surveys were conducted, yielding data for 299 cases. The study found that alarms and CCTV contributed significantly to the detection of burglaries, on-scene captures of suspects, and arrests based on eyewitness descriptions and CCTV tapes of burglars committing their crimes. This suggests the potential for increasing the number of detected burglaries and cleared cases by installing more alarms and CCTV systems in nonresidential facilities. The effectiveness of such an expansion, however, will depend on police patrol workload, police capacity to screen out the bulk of false alarm calls, and a minimization of the tendency for activated audible alarms to cause burglars to flee the scene before the CCTV can capture images of the burglars. The latter problem could be addressed with delayed-audible alarms or alarms that are not triggered upon entry, as well as a more strategic placement of hidden CCTV cameras. Implications of the findings for research design are discussed. 11 tables, 1 figure, and 41 notes