Can security guards monitor my cameras?

What monitoring by an officer means

The officer sits where the monitors are, at the lobby desk, the gatehouse or the leasing office, and watches them between rounds. When a camera shows a person in the garage at two in the morning, a car circling the lot or a door propped open, the officer goes to look, calls the manager or police as the post orders require and writes it in the report with the camera and the time. Between those moments the officer uses the cameras to decide where the next round should go. The camera system becomes a tool of the post rather than an archive.

What the property provides

A camera system that works, with the monitors or the workstation at the post, and a login for the officer that shows live views and, where the property allows it, lets the officer mark or export a clip for the incident report. Post orders record which cameras cover what, which views matter at which hours and what the officer may do with the footage. Retention, export and sharing follow the property’s own policy and Texas law; the video recording article covers the rules.

What it is not

Price Protection does not operate a remote monitoring center that watches many properties from one room. Our officers watch the cameras of the property they are on, as part of a post that includes rounds, access control and the report, so the person watching the screen can also walk to the door. The comparison with remote video services is on the guards vs remote video monitoring page.

When the cameras go down

Storms, power outages and network failures take cameras offline, and the post orders say what happens then: the officer walks the areas the cameras covered on a tighter interval and notes the outage in the report so the manager can get it fixed. The cameras go down article covers that case.

Starting a post that includes camera monitoring

Tell dispatch what system the property has, where the monitors are and which views matter, and the walk-through covers the rest. The camera monitoring guards page describes the post in detail.

Privacy and the report

Officers log what the cameras show that matters to the post and nothing else. Footage of residents, tenants and staff going about their business is not described in the report, and clips are exported only for an incident and only as the property’s policy allows.