VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — With new technologies from the Virginia Beach Police Department's Real Time Crime Center, the department is rolling out a new program called Keep Virginia Beach Safe.
Joining the program is voluntary, but the owner of a security camera could go online and register its location with the police department.
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The idea is to give an officer a reference of what tools they may have at their disposal if they're responding to an incident in a certain area or neighborhood.
"An officer may benefit from this by simply being able to pull up this program and get an idea of what resources are even in and around me when I'm in the field," Brandon Kyle, Police Services Manager, said. "I may understand that there may be cameras over in this location, I may have someone who has identified that they have a camera and may be a good resource for me to go talk to that individual."
In the past, investigators had to rely on eyewitnesses and piece together pertinent information over days and sometimes months.
"This really allows us the ability to connect to other peoples cameras in a voluntary manner and I cannot say that enough, it's voluntary for those who want to join," Kyle said.
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Some Virginia Beach residents said they are already signing up for the program.
"I think it's fantastic, we have cameras and we not only have doorbell cameras but we also have cameras under my garage and it does record the neighborhood," John Costa, who lives in Virginia Beach, said. "If anything happens and they could catch a person, we'd feel safe."
Business owners down at the Oceanfront like D.Nachnani, with Costal Edge, said just letting police know you have cameras can make a big difference in crime.
"Last year unfortunately we had a few burglaries and if it wasn't for our cameras, we wouldn't be able to foil a crime and we were literally able to do that with sharing the footage," Nachnani said.
If you do register the location of your camera, police would still need to go through the proper methods to obtain footage.
A resident could also take another step forward and choose to integrate an access feed on the cameras with the police department.
It would be a one-way feed so police could only access it when the owner allows it and settings cannot be overridden.
When it comes to home cameras like Ring, police said they do not have the capability to integrate with those.
"With the Ring cameras the capability is not currently there to do a live stream but they could absolutely register their cameras with us," Kyle said. "They could let us know we have this camera here and that would be that partnership that would easily let us reach out."
Your camera registry data is also classified as protected non-public data, and is only accessible by authorized police officers.
