The 1 a.m. alert that put police inside a break-in
A self-storage operator with no one on site got an alert, sent it to the police, and the break-ins stopped after the arrest. How a small team watches more sites than it staffs.
Self-storage is a strange business to secure. A facility has hundreds of doors and almost no staff, and the tenants themselves come and go at every hour. It is also, for that reason, a near-perfect test of whether a video agent can replace a person on site.
Storage Asset Management runs facilities without on-site presence, under a model its director of virtual operations, Lee Kunkle, describes in Spot AI's published account: "Spot AI has given us the ability to hold personnel and staff accountable without having to have infrastructure and on-site presence."
The night it was tested
The case study records one incident in a sentence: intruders detected at 1 a.m., police arriving while the crime was still under way, and break-ins at the facility stopping after the arrest was publicised. An agent flagged people where nobody should have been at that hour, and the alert reached someone who could call the police in time. What stopped the later break-ins, on the company's telling, was the arrest and word getting around the neighbourhood that it had happened.
More watched than a staffed site
Kunkle's claim about the future goes further than the one incident.
My theory is once we roll that out, we're going to confidently be able to say these facilities are more secure and more watched than our traditionally managed ones, which we pay a full-time person to be there.
If you run storage facilities you have probably assumed the opposite, that a body on site is the gold standard and remote monitoring is the compromise. The reasoning behind Kunkle's theory is that the person on site watches one place, some of the time, between other tasks, while the agent watches every camera on the feed and only interrupts a human when there is something to see.
What it replaced
Before, Kunkle says, "accessing the system and getting information was very manual and time-consuming." Now: "easy, efficient, and automated." Asked for three words, he gave "Confidence, efficiency, and security." On Spot AI's product page the same sentiment is shorter: the system is "like another team member, helping us secure more locations than we could with traditional on-site staff."
For a business built on running many sites with few people, that sentence is the business case, and the 1 a.m. arrest is the one published instance of it working.