How Mountain House maintains low crime in the face of rising crime rates
When the community of Mountain House decided to improve their already strong stance on crime, they looked to smart cameras with built-in Artificial Intelligence. What they got when they partnered with Edgeworth Security, a well-known expert in smart camera integration, was an even further reduction in crime and residents that can enjoy a community with one of the lowest crime rates in the county.
Mountain House, an all-inclusive, family-oriented community in California, currently consists of about 25,000 residents. With the combination of residential, commercial and retail spaces, Mountain House has created a space where their residents can live, work, and find entertainment without having to go far. A highly landscaped, visually attractive community, Mountain House has plenty of parks and trails to encourage residents and visitors to spend time outdoors enjoying the scenery. Mountain House is an incredibly safe community to live, work, and raise a family.
Unfortunately, all communities do experience some level of crime, with Mountain House being no exception. Furthermore, the recent spike in crimes throughout the state of California, including a sharp increase in catalytic converter thefts, has touched all communities, Mountain House included.
In keeping with their proactive stance of continuously strengthening the safety of their community, to address these issues, Mountain House looked towards the future of security: smart cameras augmented with artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. These smart cameras could help with both crime prevention and investigations, and further reduce the already low crime rate. In researching smart cameras, Mountain House landed on Avigilon (Motorola) smart cameras, and now needed an integrator that had the right product experience.
As well as being a preferred partner of Avigilon and an experienced, premium security provider that specializes in system integrations, several of Edgeworth’s integration team members live in Mountain House. This community tie comes with a natural passion for ensuring the city of Mountain House is as safe as possible for all residents.
Mountain House needed a security system integration that would meet the different needs of the mixed-use commercial, office, and residential development with one, cohesive system. Investing the time to learn about the client and their specific needs is the first, vital step in Edgeworth’s delivery of personalized, white-glove service. To get the system up and running, Mountain House’s General Manager, the San Joaquin sheriff, and Danny Haddad, Edgeworth’s Sales Engineer, walked the entire community, identifying the proper places to install the smart cameras. The camera’s locations were carefully chosen to ensure the entire community is covered by a protective blanket of technology, including parks and certain intersections. With that information, Edgeworth created a bespoke security integration design that would directly address any security needs Mountain House might have.
Edgeworth installed and integrated over 100 Avigilon AI security cameras throughout Mountain House, providing the Sheriff’s Office with over 200 unique views of the community. In recent years, Edgeworth has also designed and equipped all eight of Lammersville USD /Mountain House schools with over 350 AI Avigilon cameras. The camera’s locations were carefully chosen to ensure the entire community is covered by a protective blanket of technology.
Previously, law enforcement and Rank Security would work tirelessly circulating the city at all hours to ensure the safety of the residents, but now they are also able to leverage the smart camera’s state of the art AI technology, receiving instant alerts to any unusual or unwanted activity. During the configuration, Edgeworth’s integration team delineated the parameters on the smart cameras’ views and established exactly what activity the cameras were to send alerts for. All of these specifications were determined by a combination of Edgeworth recommendations and client requests. With these alerts, combined with the use of license plate reader cameras, law enforcement can react quickly and directly to the exact location in which the unwanted activity is occurring.
In August of 2021, Mountain House’s adoption of this innovative technology went live. And since then, thanks to the hard work of the San Joaquin’s Sheriff’s Office and Rank Security, augmented by Edgeworth’s security integration, Mountain House has seen a notable reduction in crime. They no longer have to only rely on cruising through the town; they can “be almost anywhere at once” using Edgeworth’s integration.
“Edgeworth, in cooperation with our law enforcement partners—San Joaquin County Sheriff and Rank Security—have proven to be a formidable public safety team as we’ve implemented our technology program. We look forward to continuing to grow and nurture this partnership as we strive to make Mountain House the safest community in the region.”
Steve Pinkerton, General Manager
An immediate benefit to the deployment of smart cameras throughout the city is the ability to leverage footage for crime investigation. Law enforcement has successfully relied on this newly available camera evidence to solve several cases, including a recovery of thousands of dollars’ worth of supplies at a construction site, and the arrest of several individuals involved in catalytic converter thefts, sexual assault, and domestic violence.
The catalytic converter arrest, made possible by the new technology blanketing the community, is of special note. Catalytic converters, an exhaust emission control device, are made with three precious metals — rhodium, platinum and palladium. With prices of $8,100 an ounce, this makes catalytic converters an extremely attractive target for criminals, and these thefts are on the rise.
Analytic smart cameras provided the critical evidence to successfully find and arrest a criminal who stole a catalytic converter within Mountain House. This arrest led to the discovery of a warehouse containing over 200 stolen catalytic converters. Solving this crime may not only stop any further crimes that this criminal may commit in the future, but it is also a clear and strong warning to other criminals that Mountain House is a protected community.
Now that criminals are on alert that Mountain House is extremely protected, they will be less likely to even attempt to commit crimes in the area. Edgeworth’s security integration assists in proactively identifying potentially dangerous activity, creating opportunities to stop crime before there’s a chance for harm. Residents and employees are able to enjoy an increased sense of protection, and the peace of mind that protection brings.
Edgeworth Security created a bespoke security integration system tailored to Mountain House’s exact security needs and wants. Our highly customizable security solution can be adapted for many different industries, including multi-family residencies, logistic and distribution centers, and school campuses. Besides security integration, Edgeworth also offers the Remote Guarding solution, where our highly trained live monitoring agents guard a client’s property from our US-based monitoring center. Our UL827b certified monitoring center oversees these properties 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, ensuring fast law enforcement response time and an exhaustive video archive. Remote Guarding is completely customizable to a client’s industry and specific site circumstances, with many individual components that clients can choose from. Using these different components, Edgeworth can adjust to any industry and site circumstance. Edgeworth treats all of our clients with the same care and consideration that they treat Mountain House, guarding their sites as if they lived in that community too.
With their new integration, Mountain House residents can enjoy their beautiful community with less worries about crime. Protect your community, company, or home with Edgeworth Security today and experience the peace of mind an industry-leading security company can provide.
Contact Danny Haddad at (925) 577-2856 or at [email protected] today to start your free consultation.
This story is also featured in the Tracy Press Newspaper.
