"TonyB" wrote in message
...
Unless he is watching it live, constantly, there is little point in
having
a
low quality CCTV. The recordings will not be of evidence quality, so the
Police won't be interested in them.

I used a standard home video camera connected to a domestic recorder set
to
run in long play. That gave me 8 hours of good quality tape and enabled
the
police to nick the old b*****r that was vandalising my car on a public
highway.

Home video equipment can be near broadcast quality, which is far better than
cheap CCTV.

The tapes went through the police and several solicitors and at no
time did anyone say I shouldn't have been filming.

To round the story off, the old boy ( 70+ yrs old! ) was arrested and
marched off to the nick. CPS decided that there was insufficient evidence
to
prosecute ( !! ) despite the fact that you could hear the key on the metal
for several seconds and see the bloke - who admitted it was he - but he
denied scratching the car and the video did not actually pick up his hand
against the bodywork.

That is the important bit. You have to capture irrefutable evidence of the
crime happening for the evidence to be any good in Court. Even in the recent
well-publicised case where a thief was caught on a web cam stealing the
computer it was connected to, he was convicted on the basis of his
confession when confronted with the recording, not on the evidence of the
recording.

Colin Bignell