"video verification" by a monitoring center via cameras can greatly improve police response times, and private security companies are often specifically in the

"video verification" by a monitoring center via cameras can greatly improve police response times, and private security companies are often specifically in the business of video verification systems. There isn't really a dichotomy here and cameras can be an important compliment to a security response arrangement. Increasingly, cameras are the way that security companies dispatch their guards. They are far more actionable than traditional intrusion alarms. Depending on the police department, alarm reports with video may be treated as crimes in progress while intrusion alarm activations alone are not. Unfortunately the technical standards around video verification are not widely implemented and so in practice it usually requires getting your intrusion alarm, surveillance, and security response all from the same vendor. There are common standards but the consumer security industry today is heavily organized around walled gardens and there isn't much adoption of the industry standards outside of commercial. In the commercial world these types of systems are often referred to as "pre-intrusion" since the monitoring center observes the cameras in realtime and, in theory, could dispatch guards to suspicious activity before any intrusion alarm would be triggered. In the consumer world, for cost and privacy reasons, the monitoring center usually only receives video after the activation of an intrusion alarm.