What solutions would make residents feel safer and deliver on the promise to keep them safe? Should you install fencing? Does it make sense to hire security personnel to man entrance gates and patrol the premises? What about CCTV cameras?

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These decisions are often dictated by the unique needs and liability concerns of your community, as well as your governing documents and state, federal, and local laws.

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Yet, the fact is that security remains a pressing concern for your residents.

A Need for Security: By the Numbers

• An estimated $7 million in property crimes occur annually.
• 70% of crimes involve a vehicle. Due to a lack of sufficient evidence, like a license plate number, fewer than 20% of those crimes are solved.
• 60% of stolen vehicles are associated with additional crime.

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Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. has seen an increase in various types of crime.

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For instance, motor vehicle theft was up 28% in the first quarter of 2021 versus the previous year, according to a study by the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice. 

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Package theft has also been on the rise, with 43% of Americans experiencing package theft in 2020 and 61% saying they know someone who was a victim of package theft. The research shows these numbers are up from the previous year.

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For many of these crimes, making arrests proves difficult without the right actionable evidence. Eyewitness testimony and grainy footage aren’t as powerful as people think when reporting a crime. A license plate number–even just a partial plate number–captured clearly by a camera is indisputable, unbiased, and gives the authorities a definite direction in pursuing an investigation.

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In many cases, the piece of evidence that matters most is a license plate, but a majority of modern security devices don’t capture license plate information. Up to 80% of property crimes go unsolved because police are missing license plate info for a suspect’s vehicle.

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When a crime is committed, License Plate Reader (LPR) cameras leverage state-of-the-art technology to capture details about a suspect’s license plate and other specific details about their vehicle, like its make, model, color, and other distinguishing details.

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Having fast and easy access to these details provides law enforcement with actionable evidence without having to scroll through hours of CCTV footage or rely on eyewitness accounts.

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It’s critical to assess the security systems and tools your neighborhood relies on to help police prevent and solve criminal activity and lower crime rates. Give residents peace of mind by examining the pros and cons of different neighborhood security options and delivering results.

Table of Contents

1.   How to Evaluate Your Neighborhood Security Options

2.   Neighborhood Security Patrol

3.   Volunteer Neighborhood Watch Patrol

4.   Individual Home Security

5.   CCTV Cameras

6.   Gates and Fencing

7.   Flock Safety Licence Plate Reader Cameras

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How to Evaluate Your Neighborhood Security Options

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In the best-case scenario, your security tools will help you build a safer community by giving police the tools they need to be most effective and proactively prevent crime before it occurs.

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Yet, without understanding which options are most effective and why, you could waste time and money without achieving the results your residents deserve.

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There are a few key factors to keep in mind when considering the security options for your neighborhood.

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Actionable Evidence

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If a crime is committed in your neighborhood, your security systems are only as good as the actionable evidence they can provide. Unclear footage and eyewitness accounts are seldom strong enough for the authorities to act on.

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Actionable means that the evidence you capture meets the standards of law enforcement agencies. Clear, concrete evidence results in meaningful leads and arrests.

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Proactive vs. Reactive Solutions

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The best security solutions offer a proactive approach to improving safety and helping prevent future crime.

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Most security solutions are reactive. How do your neighborhood security tools prevent crime from happening in the first place?

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The ability to identify vehicles associated with criminal activity allows law enforcement to act before an incident occurs.

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Upfront Costs

Security solutions need to fit your neighborhood budget, but quality options will come with some sort of upfront cost. Sure, it’s important to shop around and compare costs, but you also want to invest in tools that give you the best results for your money.

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Some upfront costs include:

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• The cost of the solution itself
• Installation costs
• Infrastructure costs, such as running electricity or WiFi to your solution
• Personnel costs, in the case of a security guard or gate attendant

Ongoing Costs

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Some security systems require ongoing maintenance, repairs, and software and hardware updates over time. These systems may also require professional installation and new or upgraded infrastructure for them to run in your neighborhood.

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Make sure you know what the service agreement is following installation. How much will your vendor charge to upgrade, repair, or otherwise maintain your security solution? For services they don’t provide, who provides them, and what will that cost? How much will it increase the community’s utility costs?

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If these systems break down, fail, or simply don’t provide enough actionable evidence when crimes occur, these costs can multiply.

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Time

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Installation, scheduled maintenance, and monitoring of security systems take time. With many HOAs relying on volunteers to oversee their neighborhoods, spending too long managing these tasks can take their limited attention away from other community needs.

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When crimes do occur, time is of the essence for law enforcement to have a chance to apprehend suspects and recover stolen property. Does your equipment require scrolling through hours of video footage to find the evidence law enforcement needs?

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The best security solutions allow you to take meaningful action quickly, or remove the need for volunteers to be involved at all. 

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Neighborhood Aesthetics

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For HOAs and their residents, the aesthetic appeal of their neighborhoods is important. Not only can a neighborhood's appearance affect property values and resident satisfaction, but chances are that an HOA’s governing documents dictate certain guidelines concerning architectural and aesthetic restrictions.

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You should consider how your security solutions will affect neighborhood aesthetics and how this will impact homeowners. Subtlety is important to maintain a high standard of appearance–but subtlety doesn’t need to mean less effective, and less subtlety doesn’t always mean more effective. 

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Keeping these considerations in mind, there are several security options HOAs typically consider to help protect their neighborhoods. Each comes with pros and cons worth examining.

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Neighborhood Security Patrol

No one wants to put their residents in danger unnecessarily. This reasonable instinct often leads HOAs to hire professional security staff to handle those risks. Neighborhood security personnel may man gates and entryways or patrol the premises day and night.

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Yet, hiring security staff can come with a hefty price tag. An HOA may have to pay full-time guards salaries upward of $40,000 per year. It may not be feasible for an HOA to hire personnel to patrol all day, every day–especially if the HOA is already paying a third-party management company to help operate the HOA. 

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Without additional security measures, hiring third-party security may also not be as effective as intended. Suspects can memorize patrol routes and shift changes and wait until patrols pass by before following a pre-mapped route to commit a crime.

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Neighborhood security patrols have many properties to oversee simultaneously, so they may only be able to spot the most obvious crimes in progress. Larger properties may create more blind spots for security trying to visually identify ongoing incidents.

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Volunteer Neighborhood Watch Patrol

Residents who band together to form a neighborhood watch can notify the police of ongoing crimes more quickly by staying vigilant about safety in their communities. When implemented properly, these groups can reduce crime in their areas.

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Neighborhoods with community-led watch programs may see an average 16% reduction in crime compared to those who don’t, according to a U.S. Justice Department report.

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Yet, it’s important to understand the drawbacks of relying too heavily on neighborhood watch groups or placing residents in danger when other security measures could help protect them. Imagine your volunteers happened upon an armed suspect committing a crime. How likely is it that they could achieve a positive outcome where the crime is stopped, the suspect arrested, and no one gets hurt?

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Homeowners shouldn’t have to fill the role of law enforcement by engaging suspects in dangerous confrontations. Relying solely on neighborhood watch to provide security leads to a high chance of eyewitness bias, misidentification of suspects, and other potential bad outcomes for everyone involved.  

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While a neighborhood watch can bolster a sense of community safety, it may be most effective when used in conjunction with other security measures to keep residents out of danger and produce evidence for police to leverage when a crime is committed.

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Individual Home Security

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Millions of homes across the world are becoming “smart homes,” as families invest in voice and IoT technologies like Amazon Echo and Google Nest.

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Many families are now using smart home devices for personal security, such as HD indoor and outdoor cameras, automated door locks, alarms, and motion sensors.

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One popular smart security option is doorbell cameras like Ring and Arlo, which can help spot criminal activity on your property. Timestamped video footage can potentially help police investigate these crimes.

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Yet, these systems are not always enough on their own. They typically don’t actively deter crime in the area, and by the time they’ve activated, a suspect is already at your doorstep. Once a suspect leaves the view of your camera, there’s no way of knowing where they went.

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Footage from home security systems like Ring can provide a timestamp of when a crime occurs, but they work best when paired with devices that also capture actionable evidence. 

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CCTV Cameras

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CCTV (closed-circuit television) cameras are often used by businesses and may be posted throughout a neighborhood, along roadways, in parking lots, or in surrounding common spaces. These cameras are valuable because they are constantly recording to provide real-time footage.

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While CCTV systems offer plenty of advantages, there are a few hidden costs and questions to consider.

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• The price of a CCTV system can be hard to determine. Not only do CCTV cameras come with a hefty price tag, the cost of installing and maintaining this system, including future updates and upgrades, can add up over time.
• They often only point one direction and may be too far away from a crime to capture critical details police can act on.
• Running cables and installing CCTV cameras can be costly, time-consuming, and disruptive.
• Camera lenses may get dirty or damaged by storm debris, lowering the quality of the footage captured.
• Who owns the cameras and data captured?
• CCTVs have to be monitored. That means either HOA volunteers will have to regularly check in on security cameras, or your association will have to pay someone else to monitor them. 

CCTV requires you to scroll through hours of footage to find the captured video of a crime. Not only that, but the quality may not be good enough to help police produce the right leads. To get the highest-quality images, you may have to continually upgrade your systems. If a camera isn’t working properly or has an issue with quality, you may not even know it until you pull the footage.

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Gates and Fencing

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Security fencing and gated entrances are often the first solutions people think of when it comes to HOAs and other planned neighborhoods. They imply a sense of safety inside while promising to keep crime out.

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An automated gate that only residents and their guests can access via keycard or code sends the message that safety is a top concern.

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Yet, gates can be expensive to install and maintain. Depending on the complexity of the system, you could spend up to $12,000 on a single gate.

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Gates may also not be as secure as they seem. A keycard or a code may get passed around to family or friends, or even delivery workers or other non-residents.

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Gates and fencing structures may need to be replaced periodically, and gates can—and often do—break down. A broken gate is an urgent issue. The HOA, or whoever is in charge of the gate, will have to drop what they’re doing to have the gate repaired. If maintenance can’t handle the issue immediately, the neighborhood will remain at risk until they can.

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Gates don’t produce any evidence on their own, so once a crime is committed they don’t provide a way to help police arrest suspects.

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Flock Safety License Plate Reader Cameras

Many of the security solutions mentioned above can play a role in your overall neighborhood safety strategy. Yet none capture the most important element of preventing and solving crimes: a license plate number.

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Statistics show that 70% of crimes involve a vehicle.

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As much as 80% of all property crimes go unsolved due to police not having a license plate number.

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Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader cameras capture the license plates of moving vehicles, giving police actionable evidence when a vehicle is connected to the suspect of a crime that occurred in your neighborhood, such as a hit-and-run or car burglary.

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Flock license plate cameras use a unique Vehicle Fingerprint feature to capture license plate information, including missing or covered plates, as well as other vehicle features like make, model, color, unique alterations, and distinguishing bumper stickers. This information is then automatically made searchable, categorized, and stored for fast and easy access later.

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Your neighborhood or HOA owns 100% of the data gathered by your Flock system, and data is encrypted for secure storage. Access to Flock data can be limited to specified neighborhood residents or HOA members and law enforcement.

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Flock believes that the right security tools will improve public safety while protecting civil liberties. Flock cameras do this by providing objective evidence while limiting access to that data and limiting data retention. Transparent audits by Flock allow anyone to see how the system is being used.

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Proven success

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HOAs who’ve installed Flock Safety cameras have seen the benefit to their neighborhood security.

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Memphis HOA board member Larry Hubbard noted, “If a criminal comes in that’s in a stolen car, it’s awesome that the Flock system will actually contact the local Collierville police department, and they can handle anything from there.”

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Larry’s HOA saw the benefit of sharing the vehicle data captured by Flock cameras directly with local law enforcement. Police can access a nationwide network of Flock cameras, so they can respond in real-time to Hot List alerts whenever someone connected to a crime is spotted in your neighborhood.

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Compared to hiring security personnel to man a gate system, with costs reaching easily into the tens of thousands of dollars, you can install Flock’s license plate capture cameras at entryways at a fraction of the cost.

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By comparison, a Flock Safety camera costs a fraction of the price. By leasing Flock’s license plate reader cameras, Flock customers are guaranteed to have the newest software with no additional maintenance or upkeep costs beyond the initial installation. Cameras are easy to place where they’re most needed without having to modify your existing infrastructure, with solar and battery power and LTE connectivity.

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Customize your Flock system to fit your unique neighborhood needs. Flock cameras don’t use facial recognition or capture other personal information from residents beyond license plate and vehicle data, so HOAs don’t have to worry about liability when it comes to privacy rights. Your Flock system lets you place residents on a Safe List of registered license plate numbers and allows them to opt out of being detected by Flock cameras altogether.

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When you install Flock cameras in your neighborhood, you get:

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• 24/7 protection day and night.
•  Integration with local law enforcement.
• Actionable, unbiased evidence to bring to authorities.
• A reasonable price point and low maintenance.
•  Hassle-free installation and setup, with all upgrades and maintenance handled by us.
• A subtle design that doesn’t detract from your neighborhood aesthetic.
• Data that belongs 100% to you, is erased after 30 days and is only accessible by those with special permissions.

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Proactive Alerts

Sam Meyer, former law enforcement officer and Flock's Manager of Customer Success, explains how the Flock Safety system helps prevent crime before it occurs.

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Flock Safety’s Success Adds Up

Flock’s license plate reader technology delivers on its promise to keep your neighborhood safe. Flock cameras have played a critical role in crime reduction and cases solved in communities like yours.

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• Marrietta saw a 34% drop in crime in 2020.
• Crime dropped 62% in Cobb County in 2021.
• San Marino, California experienced 70% fewer crimes.
• One Dayton, Ohio neighborhood saw crime reduced by 43%.
• Type A crimes dropped 20% in Shelby County, Tennessee.
• A Community Improvement District (CID) with over a million annual visitors recorded 46% fewer car break-ins and 25% fewer motor vehicle thefts.
• Residential neighborhoods that used Flock Safety cameras saw up to a 90% decrease in mail theft.

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Looking to invest in neighborhood security solutions to reduce crime rates and give your residents peace of mind? Flock’s HOA security fundraising guide can help you make the case to your HOA board.

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Book a free demo to learn more about how Flock Safety can help you build a more secure community.

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Flock Safety is a public safety operating system that helps communities and law enforcement in 2000+ cities work together to eliminate crime, protect privacy, and mitigate bias. We build devices that capture objective evidence and use machine learning to create and deliver unbiased investigative leads to law enforcement. Our proprietary devices and cloud-based software reduce crime by +70%. Flock Safety serves 2000 cities in 42+ states and is helping solve hundreds of crimes every day.

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