Parking Garage Surveillance: What Locations Are Your High-Risk Safety Concerns?

It is 6:00 p.m. on a dark December evening. A woman has just left her office, where she was working late, and is now walking to her car in your parking garage. Besides her laptop bag and purse, she’s carrying a couple shopping bags containing gifts for the holidays. Does she feel safe in your parking facility as she makes her way to her car?

Typically, parking garages can be ideal locations for crime. Dark corners, tight spaces, and multiple levels and/or rows of cars are prime spots for criminals to lurk. But a well-lit garage with multiple CCTV cameras strategically placed throughout the building can increase your customers’ sense of safety and protect your property. When your customers feel you are concerned about their security, they will continue to use your garage in the future and recommend it to others.

How to Maximize the Safety of Your Parking Garage

There are several ways to make your multi-level garage safer, by reducing the potential for crime, with a surveillance system. As you plan your video security system, you should consider:

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  The amount of lights installed in your building to ensure that key areas, like toll booths, elevators, and stairwells, are well lit.

  
  

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  Using color cameras instead of black and white cameras so it will be easier to identify people and vehicles.

  
  


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  The placement of CCTV cameras so that glare from the sun, car headlights, or garage lights does not affect the video image.

  
  

Prime locations for security camera installation include:

Entrances/Exits

Fixed, super-high resolution CCTV box cameras installed at entrances and exits can capture the license plates of each car entering and exiting your garage – day or night. If an accident or crime occurs in your facility, you will have a record of the vehicle’s make, model, and license plate number to provide to law enforcement to help them find the person or criminal involved.

Toll Booth

A prominently displayed high resolution, CCTV CCD box camera or a high resolution, vandal-proof, indoor dome camera installed in your toll booth can help protect your employees and aid in identifying robbers. These cameras also can help you monitor all cash and credit card transactions to ensure that your employees are not stealing from you or using customer credit card numbers to enter fake sales in order to pocket the cash.

Elevators/Stairwells

Vandal-proof bullet or dome security cameras are ideal for monitoring the entrances and insides of elevators and stairwells. By observing elevators and stairwells in real time, your employees can contact the police immediately if someone is robbed or assaulted. Also video evidence is useful in catching and convicting criminals in sexual harassment or assault cases and burglary trials.

Additionally, if individuals become trapped in an elevator, or have a heart attack or another medical condition occur while in the elevator or stairwell, CCTV monitoring enables your employees to contact emergency personnel right away to facilitate their removal from the elevator and/or the medical care they may need.

Parking Areas

While the sheer size of the parking areas in your garage may seem to make adequate protection a challenge, with the use of wide-angle, vandal-proof, bullet or dome cameras with infrared capabilities for low-light areas, you can view wide areas of your facility. Some of these cameras can even view up to 75 feet away.

Visible security cameras can help to:

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  Deter thieves from breaking into cars.

  
  


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  Discourage sexual predators from assaulting women as they get into or out of their cars.

  
  


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  Identify any vehicle or property vandals.

  
  


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  Enable your security personnel to alert the authorities of any suspicious activity occurring in your garage.

  
  

Video surveillance can help you avoid costly liability cases due to accidents occurring in your parking facility. While cameras cannot prevent accidents from happening, they can provide the necessary evidence to verify individuals’ claims about the incident.

Above all, surveillance video can provide law enforcement with the means to identify and prosecute any criminals.

Enhance Your Patrons Level of Security with CCTV

CCTV Dynamics offers a variety of complete surveillance packages or individual cameras, DVRs, or accessories for your parking garage installation, at prices to fit your budget. Visit our website today for more information on how to increase your customers’ perception about the level of protection you provide in your parking garage – which, in turn, can increase the growth of your business.