How To Test Vandal Resistance?

Not sure you could get the personnel, but wouldn't it be cool to ask a former criminal who has previously been convicted (arrested?) of vandalizing cameras to actually do the vandalizing on a variety of vandal-resistant cameras?

When you do this test, can you do it with the camera in operation to know at which point the camera dies?

We have installed cameras in public areas which were abused with a metal rod. The casing did not crack, but the shock and vibration from the impact caused some components to come loose, thus affecting the image capture.

I would be most interested in best practices for locating a camera to avoid attack. when is a camera more likely to experience vandalism. A combination of mounting Heights and occupancy types and other circumstances?? For example how low can you mount a camera outdoors that it will never be attacked?

Perhaps John, there needs to be two excercises here. One to determine typical force and point of impact of a vandal attack, and another to determine survivability of cameras. I read your referred article about mounting height and generally agree, though for the purposes of vandal resistance testing a common mounting height should be used. Perhaps a members survey?. My vote is 10'.

I'd be interested in members views on actual vandalism events. In my experience vandalism has included obscuring the camera with spray paint and, in one case, post it notes, and stealing the camera completely.

Noting the spray paint / obscuring the camera, I'm pretty sure manufacturers claiming vandal resistance aren't talking about resistance to that kind of attack.

I agree with Luis. It would make nice video and be interesting to see results, but only interesting in an "Isn't that cool, now where was I..." type of way.

Most common vandalism attacks (based on absolutely nothing scientific, just my recollection of the most common service calls I responded to as an installer):

Camera sprayed with lighter fluid and set on fire. The camera has to be mounted particularly low for this attack to be effective. I most often saw this in elevators and low hallways. I've seen this any number of times in housing projects.

Cameras hit with blunt instrument: baseball bat, hammer, rock. Mounting the camera about 10 to 12 feet from the ground usually lessened this threat. The higher the camera, the less force that could be applied. As Timothy points out, you will need some way of measuring impact. I guess you could get a radar gun, and figure the impact from the speed plus the weight of the object? I see a bunch of radar guns on Amazon for less than a hundred bucks, meant to measure the speed of baseball pitches. Maybe you could measure and see how much force an adversary can apply to a camera based on how high off the ground it is. Maybe someone already did that study.

Cameras hit with thrown objects. You'd have to be very bored, very patient, or have very good aim to try this kind of attack, but I've replaced cameras that had been hit with large rocks before.

Cameras pulled away from intended viewing area. A bullet or box camera can have a rope thrown around it, and, eventually, be ripped away from the wall or at least pointed elsewhere. A camera mounted low enough can be pulled off the wall by an adversary jumping up and grabbing it.

Gunfire. While I bet it would be fun to mount all your least favorite cameras on a wall and shoot them to bits with shotguns, I don't know how common a threat that is, and I don't think any camera would stand up very well to gunfire.

My feelings, though, is to mount the cameras at 9.5' or 10'. Too high to grab, too high to spray easily, and even if you could smack it with a baseball bat, the impact would be so light, the camera would not be damaged, and not too high as to create a viewing angle that's too steep to be useful. You could still throw a rock at it or something, I guess.

A school project I worked on installed several cameras at 12' above the floor. It took students less than a month to discover swinging a bookbag by a single strap or bouncing a basketball off a camera was a sure way of tampering with/vandalising it, even hung >10'.

Here is our camera getting hit by a wall.

This is very interesting but that doesn't mean it is an useful material that can actually acknolwedge me.

This looks like an interesting vandal resistant concept for wall mounted PTZ cameras: Axis P5414-E. The wall bracket is sloped, to prevent throwing a rope over the camera and pulling it off, like you can with a gooseneck. You couldn't even lasso it like a cowboy, although I will admit I've never actually seen anyone do that in real life anyway.

Here's Axis' IK10 test video. It includes an overview of the full test harness and a slow motion replay of the test weight crashing into the dome:

The field test looks more usefull than the formal test, I think I would take it a bit further, but then again. I don't know. I suppose if someone really wanted to "Take out" a camera, they could use a gun or a can of spraypaint.