Ring Technology Helps Police Arrest Car Burglary Suspect

A handprint on a car door helps Mesa Police track down a suspect. But in order to know where to look for that print, Ring technology was used.

“What happened is the homeowners’ car was broken into,” said Mesa Police Commander Jeff Cutler. “Afterwards, they looked at their Ring alerts and saw two people who broke into their car. So, they made an online police report and noted they also had Ring video. When they uploaded their video and sent it to Ring, we were able to pull and look at it.”

The investigator was able to spot where the suspect put his hand on the car.

“We immediately went back out there, dusted for prints on the car where he put the handprint and were able to get some fingerprint lifts off of it,” said Cmdr. Cutler. “Then we submitted that to our lab. Within a month, we had the hit back on the suspect. So, the detective now takes it over and contacts the suspect and gets a full confession he broke into the car.”

“Without that Ring video, we probably wouldn’t have printed the car and we probably wouldn’t have found the suspect.”

RING TECHNOLOGY

As far as how the Ring technology works, Cmdr. Cutler said, “Ring has the Ring App product. The owners of Ring sign up with Ring to utilize that application. When they submit a video to Ring we get to view it in our agreement. We see a video of what they want us to see only. Then we can review it and see if we can use it for identifying suspects.”

The Ring App is not strictly for law enforcement. For example, homeowners can share videos with their neighbors. But when it comes crimes, “We get good quality video or pictures of a suspect or a vehicle description or in this case, we saw where the suspect touched the vehicle,” said Cmdr. Cutler. “What we can also do with it is if we start seeing a trend in a neighborhood -- such as a vehicle burglary trend – if we know people have Rings in the area we can go ask them if they’re willing to share video with us,” Cmdr. Cutler said. “Sometimes they might not be a victim of a crime but they have the best video of the person.”

Another reason why the Ring technology is helpful to police is in the case of vehicle burglaries since detectives don’t automatically dust the car for fingerprints.

“A print on the outside of the car is not evidence someone broke into the car because a person could say they touched the car in a parking lot or touched it somewhere else,” explained Cmdr. Cutler. “Since the video shows, in this incident, the person touching the car at that spot and shows them entering the car, that’s the evidence you need. That’s how the Ring App was very successful in this case.”

ONLINE REPORTING

The investigation was also expedited due to the vehicle owner using Mesa PD’s online reporting.

“The online reporting system is where people go in and create their own report – they don’t have to wait for a police officer to come out,” Cmdr. Cutler said. “It’s a lot more customer-friendly. When you call in for a police officer, we have a list of priority calls. A vehicle burglary that already happened is very, very low priority because we have other high priority crimes-in-progress calls going on. So, instead of waiting for an officer to show up at their house, they can just go online and type up the report and submit it.”

In the event you’re at work and see someone breaking into your car through your video cam, that’s a crime in progress and officers will dispatch right away.