Surveillance, Body Cam, Cameras, Footage, Film and the Maryland Car Accident.
In looking at some of the literature on the prevalence of closed-circuit TV, video surveillance, dash cams, body cam, drones, and any number of relatively modestly-priced visual surveillance devices for use in a private setting, one thing becomes obvious- they are everywhere. Literally. The statistics vary, but certainly the number of devices capable of recording a visual image of an event now numbers well into the millions.
There really could be 60 million surveillance cameras operating in the U.S right now. Is there a corresponding effect on insurance claims?
It comes as a shock to many people that if you are walking down a sidewalk or a city street, or out and about in your car, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in what you look like, what you might be carrying in your hand, or what you might be doing. It’s all fair game for a camera, or visual recording device or surveillance equipment. [This is in contrast to the sound and content of your speech which is generally protected in Maryland from the reach of audio recording devices upon penalty of a felony].
With so many cameras and so many recording devices- and the relatively low cost of obtaining such devices and the relative ease with which the footage may be transmitted from one party to another- it would certainly seem to follow that the number of accidents and in particular motor vehicle accidents caught on film has increased substantially in the last decade. That has certainly been my experience. 15 years ago, it was essentially unheard of to find surveillance that depicted in event. Today, I Attorney Eric T. Kirk would speculate that it is almost routine to see some footage of an event or its aftermath.
It just makes sense that if a larger number of events are captured on by an empirical third-party, unimpeachable source, the claims denied by insurance companies based on word against word, or he said she said, would correspondingly have decreased. There can’t be two competing viable stories if there is one indisputably accurate source. Despite the seeming logical relations, have yet to see any independent studies showing a decrease in insurance industry claim denials or any suggestion of a correlation between a decrease in these denials.
