By MATT PIKE
St. Joseph Post
St. Joseph Police are asking residents to help fight crime by registering their household cameras into a database.
Sergeant Jeremy Peters says the database registry will show officers where registered cameras are in the area of any active investigations and adds it's easy to register your home
"Basically it's a few clicks on our web interface, you get to tell us if you like what your address is, where your cameras are, and what direction they face," Peters tells KFEQ Hotline host Barry Birr. "And in the event that we're canvassing neighborhoods in the early morning hours on a crime scene, we can already pull up a camera map and see what camera angles may be applicable to what we're looking into"
Peters says when investigators go out to a crime scene, they look for these cameras that might have angles that could help in an investigation, but...
"If we get this rolled out correctly and have enough cooperation, we can just pull up a map and already have all these locations figured out ahead of time," Peters explains. "Have people's contact information ahead of time and we can just reach out and save a lot of time that way, we can also make it to where video can be shared with us via a link, and then we don't even have to physically go to somebody's location necessarily."
Peters says it's NOT mandatory to register your camera, and says that if you are registered the police will NOT use it to access your camera
"Just because you register with us does not mean that we can just pull up your cameras anytime we want," Peters says. "This is just a name, address database so we can contact you if we need to, you're not giving us some kind of unfiltered access to your camera system or anything of that effect."
If you are interested in registering, you can click HERE.
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