At 5:30 on a fall morning in 1998, Gregory Hamrick was jolted from slumber by the shrill ring of his home phone and summoned to Fitness Quest Inc. in Canton, where he is facilities manager.
A building alarm had gone off in the shipping department and, in sleuthing the situation, Hamrick discovered some exercise equipment was missing from inventory.
It wasn’t the first time someone had gotten away with such a theft. And since the building’s alarm system wasn’t deterring the crime, Hamrick’s dilemma was to determine how it was happening. In brainstorming a solution, he presented a proposal to Bob Schnabel, president of Fitness Quest.
“When I discussed the cost and benefits of a video surveillance system, he didn’t even have to stop and think about it,” Hamrick says.
Enter Brad Harris of Canton-based Innovative Video. Harris installed a 16-camera surveillance unit in certain work areas of Fitness Quest’s 120,000-square-foot plant, the factory outlet store and all the building exits. Hamrick says the investment immediately solved the riddle.
“We caught some temporary employees with sticky fingers going out the door with some of our products. This was happening at very early morning hours, between shift changes, when there wasn’t much plant supervision,” Hamrick says, noting that Fitness Quest employs about 200 people, half of whom are temporary workers. “They would come in before their shift, go up to shipping, take some finished product and go out a door that was setting off a silent alarm. We were able to catch the whole thing on camera.”
Hamrick says the temporary workers, who tried to hide the stolen merchandise in their cars, were immediately discharged. The videotaped evidence was turned over to the company’s legal department. And the tapes were admissible in court.
“But in the seven years I’ve been installing surveillance equipment, I’ve only had two cases go to court that I know of,” says Harris. “As soon as you show an offender the videotape, they usually confess.”
Since Fitness Quest had videocams installed, Hamrick says the “strange occurrences” have dramatically decreased. “Employees know they can’t get in or out without being on camera, and videotape does not lie. It really makes people stop to think.”
The walls have eyes
Fitness Quest has also installed a hidden surveillance system to catch another type of theft that was occurring at the business.
“Some confidential company information was getting out and we couldn’t figure out how,” Hamrick says, confiding that, on videotape, “We ended up catching a cleaning lady going through the vice president’s desk, giving the information to other people inside the company. She denied it at first and said we were trying to set her up — she even threatened to sue us. But once we showed her the tape, she admitted everything.”
Hidden cameras in the company’s corporate offices also solved missing cash mysteries.
“We’ve had incidents where we had petty cash missing out of our purchasing department. We set up a hidden camera and caught one person stealing twice in a two-day period. We also caught a maintenance person taking petty cash,” Hamrick says.
Dan Craig, general manager of Miller’s Rental and Sales Inc. in Akron, says hidden cameras he installed exposed employees stealing from each other.
“Someone was stealing from other employees’ desks, and after I installed a hidden camera, I eventually caught two different people on tape,” Craig says.
In both cases, the perpetrators ’fessed up when they saw their videotaped violations.
“I think its important to try and solve the problem so people don’t think they can get away with it, because if they’re stealing from you, they could be stealing from your customers, too,” Craig says.
Thwarting theft isn’t the only reason employers say they want to watch the workplace via video camera. Harris says the practice is used to weed out troublemakers, police against sexual harassment and keep the story straight when it comes to workers’ compensation and other claims, such as slip-and-fall incidents.
“A lot of businesses are putting in camera systems where there’s a potential for horseplay, or where there’s heavy equipment use, such as forklifts,” Harris says. “Grocery stores are putting video cameras in produce sections where people could slip and fall.”
Innovative Video has also started installing monitoring systems for business owners who want to see what’s going on inside (or outside) the company walls while away from the office. One Canton-area jeweler keeps an eye on all that glitters with just such a system.
“It’s becoming very popular because they can monitor their companies by logging onto their laptops and letting their fingers do the watching,” Harris says. “It doesn’t take the place of a video recorder, but it allows you to spot-check what’s going on while you’re at home, on the road or on vacation.”
Legal static
But some say the eye in the sky is a downright invasion of personal privacy. Surveillance cameras have spawned outrage over the paucity of laws protecting the rights of employees not to be secretly monitored in the workplace, says Gino Scarselli, associate legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio.
“Unfortunately, there’s very little an employee can do in most states to guard against this kind of intrusion by an employer, unless an employee is a member of a strong union that can incorporate those kinds of protections into a collective bargaining agreement, or unless the employer is the government,” Scarselli says.
Government workers, because they are employed by the state, are protected by the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees constitutional rights to privacy and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. But private sector employees can only cite a weaker common-law right to privacy.
Akron attorney Kathryn Michael says there’s no clear-cut answer to the privacy issue.
“The controversial issue is the right to privacy, but it’s such a gray area — a balancing act between the privacy of the individual and the right of the employer to protect itself,” she says.
For example, since an employee wouldn’t generally expect to have privacy in shared work environments, visible surveillance equipment in common work areas doesn’t usually spur a lawsuit. But when a camera is hidden and a worker doesn’t know it, the issue becomes the employee’s “expectation of privacy” versus the intrusiveness of the scrutiny and the justification for it.
“There are constitutional restrictions on what the government can do that often don’t apply to private employers. If it’s a government employer, the court weighs the interests of the employer against a ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ that an employee would have. It’s a case-by-case analysis,” Scarselli says. “But surveillance is left pretty much at the will of the private employer, and the only way to remedy that is to lobby for privacy laws that would protect an employee from that kind of surveillance.”
When a company puts a lens in a place where no one expects to be watched, such tactics can lead to a losing legal battle. For example, the Boston Sheraton hotel was sued by several of its restaurant employees who were secretly videotaped in a hotel locker room — one while undressing. The company settled the claims last year for $200,000.
“If an employer feels the need to engage in that type of activity, there should be full disclosure to the employees if that employer wants to protect himself. So tell them what you’r
e doing and the reason you’re doing it,” warns Michael.
Hamrick says Fitness Quest tries to get the word out that it’s using a video surveillance system.
“It’s not really to catch them in the act or to ‘get even’ with anyone. The intent is to stop them before they decide to do it,” he says. “But if they do steal, I want to catch them and get them out of the company as soon as possible, because company theft affects the bottom line. And that affects everybody — our wages, bonuses, everything.”
But Scarselli says surveillance can actually be a detriment to a business.
“One of the things that’s important in any employer/employee relationship is a certain level of trust. Surveillance, especially hidden surveillance, erodes the trust an employee would have to trust the employer,” Scarselli says.
He acknowledges that if an employer suspects an employee is stealing, or manipulating numbers, entering false information or taking drugs, it is reasonable to conduct limited surveillance on that employee.
But, “to adopt these general policies without any reason, and with absent suspicion, is reprehensible.”
How to reach: Innovative Video, (330) 497-4005; American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, (216) 781-6276; Kathryn Michael, (330) 253-7800