Making Buena Vista Safer Security Camera Registry Program Among Initiatives
The Buena Vista Police Department is working on several initiatives to help the city qualify as a certified crime prevention community, joining 13 other cities, towns and counties in the state that have earned that distinction since 2020.
“The whole idea is trying to get the community more involved in the public safety that is happening in their own neighborhoods,” Buena Vista Police Chief Wayne Handley told The News-Gazette. “Greater input by the community leads to greater success in public safety services.
“We’re trying to catch up with a lot of things we’ve done in other places that we’ve seen that worked,” he added. “We’re not reinventing the wheel. We’re not doing anything so new that it’s never been done before. We’re trying to bring programs that have a tried and true track record.”
Heading the efforts is Officer Josh Guttmann, who joined the Buena Vista department last September after nearly 20 years of working with different law enforcement agencies in Roanoke County. Guttmann was recently certified as a crime prevention instructor and can help provide people and businesses with advice to reduce crime on their property and in their neighborhoods. In addition to his regular patrol duties, he is the point person for many of the crime prevention initiatives that are being started to earn the certification, including a registry for security and doorbell cameras within the city.
The goal of the camera registry is to allow the police department to know which homes and businesses have cameras so that if a crime occurs in the city, the department will already know what cameras might have recorded evidence of the crime. The registry is completely voluntary and the department won’t have access to the cameras without the owners’ permission.
“This would be an easier, streamlined way for someone to say, ‘I’ve got two cameras that face this road,’” Guttmann said. “And therefore, whenever a crime happens in that area, I know who to call and ask if they have any footage from this specific date and time.”
“We’re not trying to create a surveillance state here,” Chief Handley added. “We’re just trying to find whatever resources are available for us to track down anybody that’s creating problems within our community.”
Guttmann told The News-Gazette that people who register their cameras can share as much or as little information about them as they want. They can share which directions the cameras are facing, or just that they have cameras on their property. He also noted that the registry would be secure in the department’s system and wouldn’t be available to the public.
Another program that is being initiated is Triad, which focuses on partnering law enforcement agencies and organizations for senior citizens to help educate senior citizens on different local and state resources available in the community, increasing their awareness of financial scams that target them and strengthening communication between law enforcement and senior communities. Handley is involved in this program for Buena Vista and he’s also reached out to Lexington Police Chief Angela Greene and Rockbridge County Sheriff Tony McFaddin about joining the partnership. Both of them, Handley said are “on board and are looking forward to being a part of this.”
“This will be a group, regional effort on all of our parts and each of our departments will be allocating at least one person to help kind of drive that program,” he said. “So it’s not one agency that’s doing all the work. We’re all sharing in the work, but it’s for the benefit of all of our communities.”
In total, the department must meet 12 required goals and at least seven additional goals from a list of 25 optional ones in order to qualify for the Crime Prevention Community certification, including the camera registry and the Triad program. The city has already met some of the goals, including having school resource officers and a victim/witness coordinator. Others that are being started as part of this certification process include forming a neighborhood watch, creating a business watch, and forming a community safety council made up of police officers and citizens in the community.
For more information about these programs and initiatives, contact Guttmann at the Buena Vista Police Department by phone at (540) 2616174 or by email at joshua. [email protected].
