#5- Surveillance or Law Enforcement

Surveillance Videos

If you stop to think about it, you are being watched pretty much everywhere you go. There are surveillance cameras in schools, hospitals, stores, gas stations, restaurants, government buildings, and neighborhoods. These cameras watch for people that might be committing any crimes, and one of the most popular crimes being stealing or shoplifting. There are people who sit down and monitor all the footage that surveillance cameras capture in order to catch someone in the acts. Overall, surveillance videos can either help identify a suspect in a major or minor crime or sometimes even can capture weird/funny happenings. 

On January 29 of this year, a surveillance camera outside a business in Las Vegas, Nevada, recorded a man named James Edgar Lewis being shot in the head by a man in an SUV. That same night, the man from the SUV had shot three other men (who were all homeless at the time) at different locations in Las Vegas. After the shootings, the surveillance video was released to the public, and the suspect, Joshua Castellon, was approached because he has been sleeping in an SUV that looked similar to the one from the crime. Castellon was arrested on February 20 because of a federal weapons charge but was later charged with several counts of murder. 

On February 18, a surveillance camera at a home in Brookfield, Wisconsin captured a rather large cat looking inside the home. The owner of the home had first noticed several large paw prints in the snow on his front lawn. The prints made the owner check the surveillance footage from his home's surveillance video, and to his surprise, he saw a cougar peeking into his house. He later called the police department who came to his home around 6 p.m. on February 18. The police were not able to capture the cougar because "of the proximity of nearby homes." The cougar had already left the man's home when the police came back to visit the next day.

On February 14, after the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the suspect Nikolas Cruz was captured on a surveillance camera outside The Chai Center Chabad, a Jewish religious center. Cruz was making his way to the McDonald's next to The Chai Center. He had just committed a mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School and killed 17 students and teachers. Cruz sat inside the restaurant then left after a while. He was arrested about 40 minutes after he left McDonald's. Police were able to find his whereabouts to The Chai Center's surveillance video. 

Recently, in Plum, Pennsylvania, a 16 year old boy named Ryan Adams had $800 worth of baseball gear stolen from him at a car wash. The baseball gear included a backpack, two bats, a glove, a helmet, and batting gloves. Adams had been vacuuming his car with his dad at Carwash Country. After they had left the carwash, Adams noticed that his backpack that contained the baseball gear was missing. He and his dad went back and got in contact with the owner of the carwash. The owner checked the surveillance cameras and found a man in an SUV stealing the backpack from the boy's car. The man still has not been identified, although he was captured on surveillance footage.  

Although it may be annoying to feel like you are being watched all the time, surveillance videos can be helpful in many circumstances, such as identifying the suspect of a crime. There are a variety of surveillance videos out there, ranging from videos about crime to humorous occurrences, like this gem about a woman "who found a bag of cocaine in her order of cheese sticks."