Do doorbell cameras stop package thieves?

(NewsNation) — As Americans enter the holiday season, they’ll also face the challenge of porch pirates — people who swipe packages from doorsteps.

One tool that can help combat porch piracy is doorbell cameras like the popular Amazon-owned Ring system, which can record video and share that information with police. It’s estimated more than 10 million Americans now have these Ring cameras.

Last holiday season, police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, were able to nab a “serial porch pirate” thanks in part to video supplied by a homeowner’s Ring doorbell camera.

“I’m shocked that they found him so quickly,” the homeowner told local news media, “and I’m quite happy.”

Lt. Leo Viola, the public information officer at the Kenosha Police Department, said the Ring cameras are helpful in their quest to crack down on crimes like porch piracy.

“With the advent of these cameras and how available they are and how relatively inexpensive they are to set up … ultimately what it does it creates this vast type of surveillance of public areas on private property,” he said.

Viola speculated that the presence of doorbell cameras in so many places probably impacts crime.

“I would imagine it drives down a certain amount of that type of crime of opportunity as far as porch piracy goes, for sure,” he said.

He said that video transfer goes both ways, with residents sometimes coming to police with footage and police sometimes asking for footage from residents.

But Viola doesn’t view the cameras as a cure-all — being surveilled isn’t always a deterrent for would-be criminals.

He pointed to the crimes committed in public places that are heavily surveilled, like retail establishments.

“I still see daily emails and releases of suspects’ images stealing from all kinds of places, too. And everyone knows those establishments are recorded,” he said.

In one 2020 story, many police departments said they had not made arrests due to Ring cameras.

For instance, police in the Florida town of Winter Park in February 2020 said they hadn’t recorded any arrests facilitated by Ring footage since partnering with the company in April 2018.

Additionally, privacy and civil liberties advocates are concerned about how these cameras function. Many are connected to the internet, and data is uploaded elsewhere.

Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, cautioned against using camera systems where the data is regularly exported over the internet because of the risk that someone else could surreptitiously gain access to it.

“The ideal camera would be one that doesn’t stream to the internet. The data stays on your computer, not someone else’s computer,” he said.

Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that one way users can protect themselves while using these cameras is to enable encryption on services like Ring. Enabling this encryption makes it so that only the user can view the videos taken by the camera.

“That’s an option that Amazon Ring rolled out in part because of a lot of pressure from people that did not feel comfortable having all that footage sitting on Amazon’s servers unprotected,” he said.

To protect others’ privacy, Guariglia also suggested making sure your camera is positioned carefully so that you’re not inadvertently picking up audio or video from neighbors.

When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Ring said they did not have data related to the technology’s impact on porch piracy.