The Customer's Challenge
Mount Enterprise, Texas, population 586, is situated at the crossroads of Highways 84 and 259. Traffic is light, children can walk safely around town, and life is good amongst the old oaks and pines that provide shade from the Southern heat.
But even in a quiet town, crime occasionally happens.
On a Friday, a masked man walked into Citizens National Bank (CNB) in Mount Enterprise, pulled out a gun and held up a teller at point blank. Moments later, he ran out, cash in hand.
The bank copied the incident from the Dedicated Micros DVMR to disk and handed it to the Sheriff's Department.
"The Sheriff's Department and the FBI were really impressed with the images that the DVMR captured of the robbery," said Tommy Jimerson, assistant cashier over properties, purchasing and security for all of the CNB branches.
By Monday, the robber was arrested and soon his gun and all but $200 of the stolen money were recovered. The arrest also led the way to clearing up some other unsolved cases in which he had been involved. The robber is now serving an 11-year sentence.
The Dedicated Micros Solution
As CNB acquired banks over time, they inherited diverse and outdated security systems. Jimerson hired 3D Security Inc. in Henderson, Texas, to design and install compatible systems in each branch.
For the Mt. Enterprise branch, Dunn chose Dedicated Micros' Digital Sprite 2 DVMRs with nine-camera capability and 320GB internal hard drive storage, coupled with high resolution Sony and Panasonic color cameras.
"Dedicated Micros' Digital Sprite 2s allow each bank to record video at better than SVHS quality and still retain over 30 days' archive of recorded events," said Dunn. "The units are extremely easy to program, and have an activity detection feature to start the recording process for individual cameras. The ability to review incidents from any branch using the bank's WAN has proven very valuable on numerous occasions."
So if you're driving through East Texas one day and see the standard slogan, "Don't Mess With Texas," changed to, "Don't Mess With Citizens National Bank," don't be surprised, because they don't tolerate bank robberies or internal theft, and they've got the security systems to prove it.
