Law enforcement recognized the value of trail cameras almost as soon as hunters began using them. They were inexpensive, battery powered, weather resistant, motion activated, and could be placed in locations where installing a conventional surveillance camera would be difficult or impossible.
There was just one problem: a hunting camera and a law enforcement surveillance camera do not necessarily have the same mission.
A hunter normally wants to know what walked past a camera. An investigator may need to identify a person, read a license plate, determine when a vehicle entered or departed, document repeated criminal activity, or leave a camera unattended for weeks or months without drawing attention to it.
Over the years, I have talked with countless agencies about field surveillance deployments. Some have been extremely successful. Others have lost cameras because a suspect spotted them, had deployments fail because the camera was positioned incorrectly, or discovered after the fact that the equipment they selected simply could not capture the evidence they actually needed.
So whether you buy equipment from MAXSUR or somewhere else, here are several things I believe you should consider when selecting and deploying a trail camera for law enforcement surveillance.
Start With the Evidence You Need
Before worrying about camouflage, cellular plans, megapixels, or battery life, start with the mission.
What evidence are you actually trying to capture?
- Do you simply need to know when someone enters an area?
- Do you need a recognizable image of a person?
- Do you need to identify a vehicle?
- Do you need a readable license plate?
- Do you need video rather than still imagery?
- Do investigators need immediate notification when activity occurs?
- Will the system remain unattended for days, weeks, or months?
Those questions should drive the equipment decision. A camera that is excellent for detecting trespassing at a remote gate may be the wrong camera for documenting vehicles traveling down a road. Likewise, a system designed for long-duration surveillance may make more sense than a conventional trail camera when the location is difficult or risky to revisit.
Today's Cellular Trail Cameras Are Far More Capable
The cellular trail cameras we were using years ago bear little resemblance to what is available today. One of the systems we now use for these applications is the RECONYX HyperFire 4K Surveillance + License Plate Capture Cellular Camera.
The important advancement here is not simply higher resolution. The HyperFire can be configured for general surveillance or dedicated license plate capture, giving investigators the ability to select the camera around the evidence they need rather than simply accepting whatever image happens to trigger.
It also uses modern 4G cellular connectivity, allowing investigators to review imagery and manage the camera remotely without continually returning to the deployment site.
That last point is more important than it sounds.
Don't Disturb the Scene
One of the easiest ways to compromise a surveillance deployment is unnecessary activity around the camera.
Every trip back to the site creates another opportunity for someone to notice a vehicle, footprints, disturbed vegetation, a moved object, fresh tire tracks, or simply a pattern of activity that was not there before.
Remote connectivity changes this considerably. When the camera can report activity, transmit evidence, provide status information, and allow settings to be adjusted remotely, there are fewer reasons to revisit the site.
For investigative surveillance, I consider that an operational advantage—not just a convenience feature.
Use Covert Infrared Carefully
One of the lessons that has survived from the early days of trail cameras is that nighttime illumination matters.
Many consumer cameras have historically prioritized illumination distance over concealment. Depending upon the infrared technology being used, a person looking toward the camera may perceive a faint red glow from the illuminator.
For covert law enforcement applications, I strongly prefer cameras designed around no-glow or covert infrared illumination.
But there is another lesson here: more illumination is not always better. Think about where the subject will be, what the camera is expected to capture, and whether artificial illumination is necessary for the mission. The goal is usable evidence without unnecessarily advertising the camera's location.
Placement Is More Important Than Camera Specifications
I have seen inexpensive cameras perform extremely well because somebody carefully thought through the deployment. I have also seen expensive equipment produce useless evidence because it was placed poorly.
Think about the scene from the subject's perspective.
- Where do people naturally enter and leave?
- Where do vehicles slow down?
- Is there a gate, turn, driveway, trail, choke point, or access road?
- Where will the subject's face naturally be oriented?
- What objects already exist that can conceal or visually compete with the camera?
- What will the sun, headlights, vegetation, weather, and seasonal change do to the image?
If license plate capture is part of the mission, placement becomes even more important. A beautiful wide-angle overview of a road may give you excellent situational awareness and a completely unreadable plate. In many cases, you want to establish a capture point where vehicles are relatively close, predictable, and moving through a controlled field of view.
Elevation Can Be Your Friend—Until It Isn't
People tend to look forward and downward much more often than they look overhead, so elevation can provide natural concealment. It can also make opportunistic theft or tampering considerably more difficult.
But elevation creates a tradeoff.
The higher the camera goes, the more likely you are to capture the top of someone's head rather than their face. That may be perfectly acceptable if your mission is detecting activity or identifying vehicles, but less useful when positive identification of a person matters.
I would rather place a camera slightly lower and capture the evidence I need than put it high in a tree simply because the camera is harder to find.
Break Up the Man-Made Shape
This principle comes straight out of basic camouflage doctrine: man-made objects have recognizable shapes.
A rectangular green box strapped to a tree is still a rectangular box strapped to a tree.
Good concealment is often less about matching a particular shade of brown or green and more about breaking up straight lines, unnatural edges, symmetry, shadows, and reflections.
Whenever practical, use materials and features already present at the scene to make the equipment visually disappear into the environment. The concealment should look as though it belongs there.
Also pay attention to the lens. Glass and optical surfaces can reflect sunlight at surprising distances. A beautifully concealed enclosure can still be compromised by one small flash of reflected light.
Think Beyond the Trail Camera
This is probably the biggest change in my thinking since I originally wrote this article.
Sometimes a trail camera simply isn't the best tool.
There are now many different ways to solve field surveillance problems, and I would rather select the architecture that fits the scene than force every mission into a trail-camera form factor.
You can see the broader range of approaches in our MAXSUR Field Surveillance Solutions.
Longhorn: When Long Duration and Deep Concealment Matter
For particularly difficult rural or remote deployments, a system such as the MAXSUR Longhorn Long-Duration Field Surveillance System takes a different approach.
Instead of making the entire surveillance package look like a trail camera, much of the system can be concealed or buried while the camera and sensor are positioned where they provide the best evidence.
That separation can be extremely useful. The best location for the camera is not always the best location for the batteries, communications hardware, recording equipment, or other electronics.
Long-duration systems are especially attractive when the activity is infrequent and returning to the site is difficult, conspicuous, or operationally risky.
TerraGuard: Sometimes the Concealment Should Already Look Natural
There are also situations where spending time disguising a conventional camera doesn't make much sense.
The TerraGuard Covert Video Rock Camera is an example of a purpose-built concealment designed to already look like part of the environment.
This can dramatically simplify deployment in the right location. Instead of installing an obvious piece of electronics and then trying to camouflage it, the surveillance equipment begins with a natural-looking concealment.
That can be especially valuable when investigators want to minimize the amount of time spent working close to the target area.
GBOX Mini: Urban Field Surveillance Is a Different Problem
Trail cameras are naturally associated with trees, trails, rural roads, and wooded areas. Put the same camouflage-patterned box in an urban environment and sometimes it becomes the most interesting object in the scene.
For those locations, something such as the GBOX Mini covert utility enclosure camera may make more sense.
The principle is the same: concealment should match the environment.
In the woods, that may mean rocks, vegetation, trees, or buried electronics. Around infrastructure, commercial properties, alleys, parking areas, or urban utility corridors, the better concealment may be something that visually reads as ordinary infrastructure.
Think in Layers Instead of Relying on One Camera
Another lesson I have learned over the years is not to make one camera responsible for everything when the investigation justifies a broader deployment.
A camera positioned for license plates may not give you the best facial identification. A camera positioned for an overall scene may not identify a plate. A highly concealed camera may provide evidence but not the situational awareness investigators want in real time.
When appropriate, multiple complementary sensors or cameras can cover different evidence requirements:
- Overview: What happened?
- Identification: Who was there?
- Vehicle identification: What vehicle entered or left?
- License plate capture: What plate was displayed?
- Alerting: When did activity occur?
You do not necessarily need a complicated system. You simply need to think about the investigation as an evidence problem rather than a camera problem.
Power, Connectivity and Maintenance Still Matter
No field surveillance system is useful if it stops operating before the event occurs.
Estimate runtime based upon the actual mission: expected trigger volume, temperature, cellular signal quality, image or video transmission, nighttime illumination, and how frequently investigators can safely service the equipment.
External batteries, solar power, low-power standby systems, and remotely managed cameras can all extend deployment time, but there is no universal answer. A camera receiving hundreds of activations per day has a very different power profile from one waiting several weeks for a single vehicle to appear.
The same is true of cellular connectivity. Before deployment, verify the actual carrier performance at the site rather than assuming coverage based on a coverage map.
Don't Buy Features—Buy the Outcome
Years ago, I ended this article by recommending agencies avoid overspending on trail cameras simply because a more expensive camera sounded better on paper.
I still believe that, but I would frame it differently today.
Don't buy the most expensive camera. Don't automatically buy the least expensive camera either. Buy the solution that gives you the greatest probability of capturing the evidence the investigation requires.
Sometimes that will be a relatively straightforward cellular trail camera. Sometimes it will be a specialized license plate camera. Sometimes it will be a buried long-duration system, a rock concealment, a utility enclosure, or a completely custom solution.
Technology has come a long way since law enforcement first began adapting hunting cameras for investigative use. The opportunity today is to stop thinking of field surveillance as a single product category and instead look at the entire scene: evidence requirements, environment, concealment, runtime, communications, access risk, and the behavior of the people you are trying to document.
Do that well, and the camera becomes only one part of a much better surveillance strategy.
If you're working through a difficult rural, remote, urban, or critical-infrastructure surveillance problem, you can explore our complete field surveillance solutions or contact the MAXSUR team. We have spent a lot of years solving the locations where the first reaction is, “There is nowhere to put a camera here.” Those are usually the interesting ones.
Thank you for reading!
Jake