The Macon Bibb County Sheriff’s office is asking people who own doorbell cameras and other surveillance systems to join a new program giving officers easier access to the footage.
The new effort, called Operation Safer Together, is modeled on a program from the Atlanta Police Department. It’s aimed at filling in gaps in the cloud-connected network of camera owning to local government. Those are mostly in downtown Macon and in public housing.
Capt. Jason Batchelor leads the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office Criminal Intelligence Unit. He says putting your camera — like your doorbell camera or the one above a garage or the street corner — on the list does not necessarily give him instant access to your footage.
“It essentially is just allowing us to know, in which areas there is footage or there is surveillance coverage, to provide us an opportunity to reach out to you if there's a crime that has occurred in that area,” Batchelor said.
That could enable investigators to get away from gumshoe canvassing of a neighborhood for privately owned cameras during an emergency. That can take a lot of time when, from the law enforcement perspective, there isn’t much time to lose.
But the Bibb County program will offer tiers of collaboration, too, including an option to grant investigators direct access to camera feeds and fully integrate those into the county maintained surveillance system.
Residents representing some 3,000 addresses have agreed to that level of cooperation with the Atlanta Police Department in its program.
