Society MN # 4 2001

Video Monitor Scares Away Criminals

A crime-infested courtyard sees no serious offenses after the installation of a video monitoring system

By Yulia Bulanova

Vremya MN

The first centralized post for video mon­itoring of apartment house entrances was installed last week in a residential build­ing near the Novoslobodskaya subway station. The observation system includes 13 video cameras that cover not only as many entranceway doors, but also the entire courtyard, which used to see all sorts of wrongdoings and disturbances reported by the police.

The six five-story buildings, located not far from Dolgorukovskaya Street, form a courtyard that seems to attract thugs and robbers. Stealing a car there is child's play: Just start up the engine, drive through the arch and vanish in the heavy traffic.

However, the crime-ridden courtyard saw a dramatic change last month, when the police reported not a single serious incident happening there. The only indi­viduals who sometimes made the resi­dents uneasy were the local drunks, who would come to drink vodka in the priva­cy of a small pavilion near the children's playground. But now the pavilion is mon­itored by a video camera.

The yard, entrances and pavilion are visible on the monitor of the security guard. If anything suspicious occurs in any of these places, the picture on the monitor grows larger, and the guard on duty will see what is happening there. On his right is an alarm button that he will press to call the police patrol. What the camera does not see (garrets, entrances to the basement, the machinery room, the

electrical distribution box) is monitored by the dispatcher at GREP (City Mainte­nance and Repair Enterprise). Whenever a door to any of these facilities opens, an audio signal rings out on the GREP con­trol board. Nowadays, nearly all of the city's maintenance and repair companies have such an audio monitoring system, except that some use a computer-aided

system while others still have the old panel board. But the apartment houses on Dolgorukovskaya Street are the only ones that have video monitoring.

The system has been in place there for a month or so by way of experiment. The police have big plans with regard to it. Provided there is steady funding from the Moscow city government, the courtyards

and entrances of all apartment houses in Moscow will come within the range of the vigilant eyes of video cameras.

Says Viktor Vokhmintsev, the Moscow police's deputy chief for public safety: " Thanks to the video observation system, we always know who came and went where and when. We can also establish the distinctive marks of any criminal who

has been in the place under observation. By means of digital deciphering of a de­piction, we will get a proper photograph, not a composite sketch, of the criminal."

The security guard on duty has seven video cassettes — one for each day of the week. The recordings are kept intact for at least a week. Infrared rays are used for night-time recording. The only shortcom­ing is that the inside of entrance halls can­not be monitored. So the concierge babushkas can rest assured that they will not lose their jobs.

It's a different matter that most Moscow apartment houses do not have entrance halk large enough to accommodate a con­cierge. That's where the video monitoring system comes in. It also helps scare away would-be thieves of motor vehicles.

Fortunately for the tenants, they do not have to pay for their peace of mind. All expenses on the system are borne by the City Hall under a program called " My Courtyard, My Entranceway." The equip­ment for a video monitoring system for one entrance costs 18, 000 rubles. To ob­tain such a system, the person in charge of the entrance hall should, on behalf of the tenants, apply to the Single Order Di­rectorate or to the local branch of the non-departmental security guard.

Any tenant who wants to be his own concierge can do so for a fee. A signal from the camera monitoring the entrance to the building can be fed into one of the chan­nels of the television set. On switching to that channel the tenant will see who has approached the entrance, or whether the family car is still parked nearby.

So far only six percent of the apartment house entrances in Moscow are guarded round the clock under the My Courtyard, My Entranceway program. But these are millions of apartments whose occupants feel protected in our troubled times. ■