Frontline Worker Lost Gear in Car Theft and How You Could’ve Helped

Header image source: Global News

If you are at home reading this and your biggest worry is running out of snacks or toilet paper, you’re definitely among some of the lucky ones around the world right now. You can still scoop up your kids and tuck them in at night, or offer to help your elderly neighbor grab groceries from the stores. While governments and health officials continue to beg everyone to stay at home, there’s a group that can’t do that.

The people on the frontline fighting the coronavirus, the nurses, doctors, hospital workers, and first responders who bravely defend the sick; essential service workers who bravely serve their communities. The reality is, many frontline heroes are dealing with enormous amounts of fear and stress: medical supplies, protective gear, and workload. Their lives outside of work aren’t easy either, whether it’s finding food after their shift, parking, the meticulous hygiene they have to practice before even entering their own homes. Some of them are even resorting to AirBnB and hotels so they can have a place to crash without fearing spread to their loved ones.

All the things they have to put aside to honor the commitment they made when they chose to dedicate their lives to medicine - things that many of us take for granted, things that they shouldn’t have to worry about at trying times, and one of such things is car theft.

With many cities, states, and provinces on lockdown, many businesses have had to close down or are open for reduced hours, becoming a target for thieves. Police forces across the continent are taking significant measures to curb property crime.

Now if only the police trailer was around when thieves broke into a Vancouver paramedic’s car and took off with her work gear.

We have all been told the dash cams are effective security measures against car thefts, and it’s not just for your own vehicle, but those around you, too. Imagine if some of the cars nearby had a dash cam set to Time Lapse parking surveillance and was able to capture the crime as it happened.

In Time Lapse parking mode, your dash cam switches to recording at a reduced frame rate (e.g. 1 fps) when the ignition is off, resulting in a time-lapse video. Time Lapse Parking Mode, comes standard in almost all models.

With Time Lapse recording enabled, your dash cam will continuously snap a photo at 1 or 2 frames per second. These images are then strung together to create a video that is played back at 30FPS. The beauty of time-lapse recording is you get long periods of parking surveillance continuously without increasing the dash cam’s power consumption, and you still get impact detection.

Time Lapse parking mode records at 1FPS, or put simply, each hour of Time Lapse video covers a real-time of 30 hours. In other words, a DR900S-2CH with the smallest 16GB microSD card (recording capacity of 55 minutes) can run for over 27 hours in Time Lapse Parking Mode before starting to loop.

Time Lapse parking mode records at 2FPS and timelapse footage collected over a 10-minute time frame will be compressed into a 2-min file. For example, when using the Parking Priority Partition on a 32GB SD card, the U1000 2-CH reserves 45.1% of the SD card capacity for Time Lapse files, you can get up 83 minutes of Time Lapse footage before overwriting kicks in.

Similiar idea for the VIOFO A129 Pro Duo dash cam, with the exception of the added option to change the timelapse increments to 1, 2, 3, 5, 15 or 20FPS.

Time Lapse is a good option if you regularly park in a busy parking lot that would normally cause your motion-activated parking mode camera to be active almost constantly. With a time-lapse configuration, the camera captures images using one or two frames per second instead of 15 frames per second that’s common with normal motion detection mode. Time-lapse format reduces the amount of footage on your memory card so it doesn’t fill up too fast, but will still capture anything that happens to your vehicle while it’s parked.

Also, with Time Lapse recording, the camera is snapping an image of anything and everything in its field of view, this allows the camera to capture much more than just motion or impact within its detection range. So in addition to watching over your vehicle, you also get surveillance of everything else that is happening around, including the cars within the camera’s view.

But there is also a downside to Time Lapse mode: you may miss details like license plates depending on speed. Also, you won't be able to capture any audio which could identify people who may be up to no good.

So, back to our paramedic’s story, if say you were her neighbor and you had Time Lapse recording enable. You could’ve captured the incident on your dash cam and would have been able to help her (and the cops) find the culprit and hopefully recover her gear.

Like we mentioned earlier, almost all dash cams come with Time Lapse parking mode. So, when picking the best parking mode dash cam, we recommend checking out the entire parking mode offering of the dash cam.

We have all the information on the different parking recording modes and the recommended dash cams on our website at What is Parking Mode?

Let’s be honest, a lot of times door dings on our car and even acts of vandalism care the absolute worst to deal with, and even more so in trying times like now. Without any witness, these claims are not only hard to resolve but could cost thousands of dollars in damages and more.

A dash cam in your vehicle will help you in whatever situation you are in. And in addition to watching over your own vehicle, you can also help others out by monitoring the shared surroundings. Now is the time we need to take care of everyone in the community - if you have a dash cam and if you live around hospitals, healthcare facilities or anywhere essential workers are, perhaps it’s a good idea to enable Time Lapse parking mode on your dash cam, because you never know when and who your recorded footage will help.

If you have questions about parking mode or if you want to learn how to run parking mode without putting strains on your vehicle battery, talk to us. We will gladly send you our most honest opinion and recommendations.

Until next time, stay safe and stay healthy! And we hope Annelie recovers her gear, especially the stork pin.