After a spate of incidents, Swincar Nurseries, a family-run business, installed a Panasonic surveillance system consisting of 11 cameras and a digital video recorder in 2011.  In Autumn 2014, a further two Panasonic surveillance cameras were added to the system along with the latest firmware which significantly improved the performance of the original cameras.

A successful prosecution was recently made against a man stealing from the growing nursery as a result of evidence captured by the newly updated surveillance system.

“A customer told us he’d seen a man acting strangely. He’d walked up to the Nursery with a trolley and disappeared. But when he came back he had no plants and no trolley. We saw him park his car out of the way, but right under a camera,” said Andrew Fisher.

“The police were able to make a successful prosecution on the back of evidence collected by the surveillance system. It’s reassuring that the image quality is that good and we can clearly see what’s going on. The police said the image quality was by far the best they’d ever seen.”

Prosecutions aside, Andrew Fisher has been able to help his customers with the assistance of the surveillance system, from cards left in card machines or the electrician thinking he’d left tools on site.

On one occasion, they were able to help an elderly customer locate his walking stick. “We had an old gentleman come into the shop, he came in and he had a walking stick he was very fond of. He rang up later in the day said he left his walking stick. So we checked around, no walking stick, but he said it must be there,” said Andrew Fisher.

“We looked back on the CCTV, saw the gentleman come and leave with the walking stick, and saw him in the car park putting it back on the parcel shelf of his car. So we rang him up and told him, he couldn’t believe it!”

The nursery also uses remote access to monitor security on site; Andrew can access the live HD CCTV footage from his smartphone or tablet device, whether down the road or on holiday.

“The main reason we chose Panasonic over other brands was that the quality of the image we saw with the cameras. When we looked at the Panasonic product it was clear and crisp, a good image and the night time capability was absolutely fantastic. The whole package put together by Panasonic was very attractive,” Andrew concluded.