When installing CCTV cameras, security experts will typically prioritise the highest risk areas, ensuring there are enough lines of sight to adequately capture suspicious activity whilst keeping within privacy regulations.
Whilst the most important consideration is ensuring that your CCTV setup is legal, reasonable and justifiable, positioning is also essential to ensure that your cameras are adequate and fit for their intended purpose in order to provide usable footage.
In order of priority, here are the places you should position your CCTV cameras, as well as top tips for placement, angles, lenses and other factors that could affect their usefulness.
Should You Fit CCTV Cameras At Each Entrance?
If you are limited by budget, feasibility or regulatory guidance in the number of cameras you can install around your property, your priority should always be the primary entrances to your building.
The main entrance and reception area should be covered with a camera high enough to capture facial images unimpeded, whilst taking into account expected traffic at all times of the day.
As well as this, if you have side or back entrances, they should also have CCTV installed, as they will typically be the next option for potential intruders. As well as this, your perimeter fencing should have broadly encompassing CCTV where possible, prioritising any entrance gates.
Which High Risk Areas Should Take Priority?
Intruders typically take a path of least resistance approach to breaking into a property; either they will spot an opportunity to quickly and quietly enter, or they will typically avoid taking the risk.
As such, you should focus on areas of your building that are considered to be at a higher risk for potential criminality. This includes loading and delivery bays, where goods and money could be potentially stolen, as well as areas which hold significant amounts of cash, such as around tills and vaults.
Exactly which areas are high risk can vary depending on the nature of the business, and working with security experts can ensure that your camera setup is fit for purpose.
Common areas considered high risk include:
- Stockrooms
- Cash handling areas
- Server rooms, data centres and other vital IT infrastructure
Depending on the location, it may be important to either adjust the lighting of high-risk areas to provide more legible footage or opt for night vision where adding additional lighting would be otherwise impractical or unfeasible.
Which Blind Spots Should Be Prioritised For CCTV?
If you are aware of more hidden areas on your property, particularly those which could provide access to the inside of your building without being detected by your other cameras.
Stairwells, alcoves, the back corners of offices, the more shadowy parts of your car park and storage sheds for bins and waste disposal can all inadvertently provide cover for potential intruders.
Where Should You Not Install Cameras?
People have a right to a reasonable expectation of privacy, which means that areas that would be typically considered private should not have security cameras installed in them, as it would neither be fair nor proportionate.
Toilets, showers, changing facilities, private office rooms and other similar spaces should not have cameras installed unless there is an exceptional case to do so and it is made explicitly clear that people are being filmed in these areas.
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