A message for all RING Camera owners from the Roanoke Police Department
(The following has been provided to NiSR by the RPD. NiSR are sharing it here for your convenience and is not intended as advice or recommendation from the NiSR Board or its membership.) Here is the quick summary on how Ring Camera owners can maximize their utility.
#1 – The Ring Neighbors App
This app allows users to upload footage (or photos) from their Ring cameras to be shared with other users who live around their neighborhood (or even the whole city). The point of this app is so that neighbors can “see something say something” with their neighbors and share footage of suspicious activity/hazards/crime, and other neighbors can be alerted on what to look for. What's more, this content is available for the PD to view (emphasize that the PD can only view footage that users share, we can’t “tap in” to their cameras and look at anything unless they specifically share it on the app). With that said, if a user has footage of a crime or something else that the PD needs to know about, advise them that they still need to call the PD to let us know what is going on. There is a lot of footage shared online, and analysts/detectives could easily miss footage if we don’t know what we are looking for. You can hit them with my favorite phrase: “When in doubt, call it out!” https://ring.com/neighbors #2 – Law Enforcement Portal Occasionally the police department determines that a crime has occurred in an area where there is a large amount of Ring Cameras. In such a situation, the police department uses the Ring Law Enforcement Portal to send a message (by e-mail) to all Ring users in that area, with a message asking users to check their footage for any footage relevant to the crime. The message will contain the date and approximate time to search. Users then will have the ability to select any footage they find and either upload it or contact the police department so that we can retrieve it. Again, the police cannot “tap in” to the cameras; users have to search the footage and share it, OR give investigators permission to access their footage to find the relevant footage. Let me know if there are any questions! Andrew Reece Senior Crime Analyst (CCIA, CLEA) iSTAR Center Roanoke Police Department Office 540-853-5879 Andrew.Reece@RoanokeVA.gov
###