Eye in the Sky: Behind the Scenes in Casino Surveillance
Many of us are fascinated and intrigued by what goes on behind the “eye in the sky”. In this exclusive interview, we get the inside scoop on what goes on inside of casino surveillance and what happens in the day to day operations of casino surveillance.
We’ll call our interviewee “Suzy” to protect her identity. Suzy worked at one of the larger tribal casinos in the Midwest. Below is our interview that gives the reader a glimpse inside the fascinating and often funny world of casino surveillance.
Craig from URComped: So how did you get your job in casino surveillance?
Suzy from Surveillance: So actually I had a friend whose mother was working at the casino in surveillance at the time. The casino was pretty much brand new. It had only been open for maybe a year at the time of my employment. I was interested because our state had just recently legalized gaming, and it was going to be a huge employer for the city in which we lived.
And so I had been working at this other job for quite a while and had finished my degree in communications. I wanted to explore other opportunities so I looked into the casino marketing and all of that stuff that was going on with the tribal nation that was operating the casino.
I thought that maybe I could start in surveillance and eventually transition my way over to casino marketing. Sort of a foot in the door kind of opportunity.
URComped: Is there a super extensive background check to work in surveillance?
SS: Surprisingly no, it was very standard obligation practices. Probably one of the easiest ones I've ever done. You do have to take a drug test of course, and I'm sure they wouldn't hire known felons. But nothing really extraordinarily different from any other job that you'd apply for.
The background check for surveillance wasn't as difficult or thorough as expected...
URComped: When you started working there, what was the surveillance room like? I mean were there just a million TVs, and flat screens?
SS: So there are several TV's, but probably not the image that you're wanting to evoke of like the Vegas theme.
There's just tons of TV's monitoring every casino camera. There are thousands and thousands of cameras in the casinos. So there's just no room for that. It's a pretty average size room, I wouldn't say the room was incredibly large by any means. 15 people or so could fit in the room at a time.
And there's different stations, and every day you rotate stations. You monitor certain parts of the casino, so nobody's watching every single camera at every single minute. Every camera is rolling throughout the day non-stop. You can access those cameras at any time. But it's more of a targeted focus on any part of the casino.
So we'll have a focus on the blackjack pits or the poker pits. Or we'll focus on the soft counts. Or the cages when people are cashing in their chips. We can go and look at any camera at any time, and if there's a note from security to look at a specific camera, we then can transition and look at that.
But it's just too unwieldy to try and look at everything at once, so it's not as big as most people would probably expect.
URComped: So the time spent watching video, what was the percent breakdown of watching live surveillance footage versus watching recordings of previous footage?
SS: There is one dedicated space up there to watch recorded footage. Usually, there's several different shifts because a casino operates 24/7. There's always something to go look at that maybe that didn't get finished up on a certain shift. So most of the casino cameras or the stations are watching live footage all day every day. Auditing employees, putting eyes on certain parts of the casino.
But there is a dedicated space to going back and reviewing anything that happened from the night before as well as the morning of. There's always crazy stuff going on. Maybe somebody had their purse stolen, we would go back and review the footage and try to find where they were at. You go back and trace those footsteps and you follow exactly what happened and follow the perpetrator, the victim or whatever, throughout the casino and you write up reports and send them in to the police.
There's one station dedicated to mostly reviewing footage depending on what it is, everyday. The rest of the stations are always watching live footage.
URComped: Is it true that employees that are working surveillance aren't allowed to hang out with or fraternize with other casino employees?
SS: Not while you're on duty, that's for sure. So you basically stay in your surveillance room, if you ever go out to get food or something in the casino because there's tons of restaurants, you aren't allowed to actually be on the casino floor at any time. So the little path surrounding the outer parts of the casino where you can get your food are basically it, then you go back up. But yes, you're not really allowed to talk to anybody like that during your shift.
If you want to be friends outside of work, I don't think that's ever been an issue.
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URComped: Okay, and I know a lot of the job is watching internal employees, but what are the kind of gambling scams or tricks you were taught to look out for? What are you really watching for with customers?
SS: As far as the casino surveillance room is concerned, we don't really have specific signals or anything that we really look for. Again, it's really hard to spot those things in real time regardless. So most of that detection work is probably done by the pit bosses who are familiar with the players that come in frequently and then they will let us know what to watch. But identifying cheaters or people like that wasn't typically what we did.
We dealt with a lot more than just looking for con artist rings trying to scam the casino. That kind of stuff doesn't really happen as much as movies would like to have you believe.
Really it's a lot of people stealing from each other in the casino. Somebody stealing someone's ticket that they cashed out real quick without them noticing. Or, somebody stealing each other's purse, or somebody is getting into a fight. Those things are what happen most frequently that we end up having to deal with a lot of at the end of the day.
Also of course you can't forget the biggest threat, internal theft from our employees. That's why we watch soft count and hard count. We watch the cages making sure that the people who are discounting chips or cash; they're clearing their hands after everything. Because that's where a lot of the money's gonna leak out of.
URComped: So the big focus for internal employees is just watching the people that are able to handle money?
SS: Yes, we audit employees to make sure. We'll do random audits of people in the cages, people in soft count, to see how many times they clear their hands. Are they following protocol? Are they doing the things that they are supposed to be doing as employees of the casino and not giving away chips or trying to steal cash from themselves before it gets transferred into cash. So, again, that is kind of where a lot of the money would go more so than anybody getting tons of money from scamming the casino.
URComped: So a lot of our players at URComped are getting comped, and those comps are based on people's average bet and length of time played. I know sometimes there's been disputes with players that look at the rating, or ask their host about the rating after a trip, and they feel like they their average bet was way too low or they didn't get enough credit for time at the table. And sometimes that would get sent to surveillance, or it gets handled in some way to correct the rating. Now is that something that you ever dealt with or heard about at your property?
SS: No, unfortunately we didn't really deal with comps. Now that's not to say that we hadn't before or wouldn't be doing that now. That just was never a prime focus. But if security or management asks us to review that we certainly could probably pull up that footage for that individual if it was needed.
URComped: Got it, and so was the person that would be reviewing footage, was that a set position or would you rotate from one day watching live action all day, and then one day a week you're doing review? Or how's that broken down in surveillance?
SS: For the casino that I worked for, we always rotated. So every day you would be on a different station.
She rotated positions daily like a roulette wheel. A game which coincidentally isn't allowed at most Tribal casinos.
URComped: What was your favorite part of the job?
SS: My favorite part was playing with all the PTZ cameras, PTZ of course being pan, tilt, zoom. There's lots of fixed cameras in the casino over the tables and stuff that you really can't move around. But when you were on the station that would go review footage, there's always the PTZ cameras that you can play with, and you can zoom in on people and zoom out on people. And so, that was really fun and they went quite a long ways. I mean, people don't always realize that we had cameras in the parking lot, so we could follow your car out on to the highway for a ways. So you were still being photographed and have footage of you even after you've left the casino property. So they're pretty intense, and playing with those was really fun. Then of course, we always had fun videoing customers or people in the casino that were just doing silly things. So for me, I worked a night shift from 11 to 7, and saw some pretty crazy things happen there.
There were always concerts going on or people were getting into fights. You could see people being crazy, people being drunk. We had a lot of crazy footage of people doing stupid things. So even if it got slow during the 3 AM shift we would always have something to have a laugh about.
URComped: So I have heard this before that there are highlight tapes that get sent around. So did that happen at your property?
SS: Just know that you're always being recorded, and that some people may or may not actually store that in a video file. It was nice to have a good laugh from time to time. There's a lot of funny videos in the file that may or may not exist of funny interactions. People that would fall down or people that would pick their nose while they were withdrawing cash from the ATM.
Warning: Do not pick your nose in a casino. You might end up on a surveillance team gag real.
URComped: Okay, and what was your least favorite part of the job?
SS: Least favorite part of the job. Casinos are a little bit smoky, and not that I was ever really on the floor very much, but when I was, smoke is not always fun to inhale. But sometimes you saw some pretty sad things happen. You see some really fun and amazing parts when people win big jackpots.
But being in the night shift too, you see people that come in at 3 in the morning, and there's not a whole lot to really watch at certain times of the day at the casino. You'll be watching certain players, and you can just tell that they have no business being there and probably shouldn't be gambling away their mortgage or whatever else.
So, sometimes it was just kinda sad. Or you see people get their stuff stolen from when you're going back and reviewing footage, and you're having to write up these police reports. It's good to be vigilant if you are in a casino because odds are you need to be keeping track of where your stuff is and who you're talking to, and because things do get stolen and people can get robbed from each other there, and so sometimes that was really sad to see.
URComped: Now when you're doing police reports, so you worked at a tribal casino, and I think probably at this point, most of the casinos around the US are tribal casinos, do you work with some kind of tribal police authority or are you working with the feds? Who are you reporting this to?
SS: So we work with the tribal authorities. They would come onto the property at certain times, and they would do investigations as well. They also work in conjunction with the local police, and I'm sure the federal police if it were needed. But everything really does kind of go through the tribal police whenever there's an incident at the casino. And then, of course, they partner with the local police if need be, if it happens on the casino property or immediately outside the casino property, I know that they work together quite a bit. But yeah, everything definitely happens and goes through the tribal police while taking place on the casino property.
We had one case where some woman fell. She tripped while on the casino property, but fell and broke her wrist outside of the casino property line.
So it's kind of like who's responsible for what? There's just a lot of really interesting components, especially when you're working at a tribal casino. There's just lots of interesting rules and the way things are done.
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URComped: What were some of the biggest wins you remember seeing while you were working?
SS: When you're so busy recording things and looking for specific people or details that security sends up to you, you don't really get to focus on who wins what or how much it is. I know that we had several regular players that would come in and it seemed like every other night they were winning jackpots on these slot machines in the one part of the casino. It was crazy. But yeah, as far as how much any individual won, I can't really recall anything specific.
URComped: Any crazy stories that are interesting for some of our blog readers?
SS: There were some really interesting stories that happened, one of them was, apparently, this person was playing a penny slot machine and won a million pennies or something.
But it's not anywhere near a million dollars. Apparently, one of our casino staff came over and said, "looks like you won a million dollars, ma'am, congratulations!" And of course she didn't win a million dollars, but she successfully somehow wielded her way in saying that the staff told her she won a million dollars, and ended up getting some kind of large settlement from that.
I'm not sure if it was ever quite a million dollars, but that was really interesting. We've had some people do crazy things at the tables. We've had one person put a rosary down on a table, which you're not really allowed to do, and was doing some kind of weird ritualistic thing at like 3 AM, trying to will himself to win.
I don't even think he knew how to play blackjack, truthfully. But yeah, just really interesting characters that come into the casino all the time. Even sometimes with staff too, staff will do some funny things. And so, it was always interesting. You really never got bored, even if the casino was slow, there was always some things you can go and look at, and get a good laugh out of.
Apparently in a casino, getting them to say "you've won a million dollars" is as good as actually winning it...
URComped: So advice for our readers is to, if you hit a slot jackpot, try to get the staff to say you won a million dollars?
SS: Yeah, you're welcome to try. I think everyone's been well trained to not say that anymore.
There are certain protocols, very specific protocols. I've never been on the floor so I'm not exactly sure what all of those are. But you have to be very, very careful about the way that you word things to casino guests, so you don't give them any kind of false impression because I know that was an issue.
If you can successfully get a casino employee to tell you that you've won a million dollars when you obviously haven't, you may hit a jackpot.
URComped: All right, anything else that we didn't talk about that's unique or interesting about your career in surveillance?
SS: I wish it were as fun as the way it looks in the movies, where you're always playing the detective. And in some cases you are playing the detective, especially when you're going through footage and you're following people through the casino, or you're recording people who've won a royal flush from playing poker.
It kind of seems very exciting and exotic, but most days it really wasn't. It was just really a lot of auditing and a lot of just watching people do their thing while they're playing their games, and a lot of that action probably is more with the pit bosses downstairs.
They see all kinds of stuff, and then they tell us what to look for. So it's not as moment to moment as movies would have you believe, but it definitely was fun. It's one of the most interesting jobs that I've ever done. Although it wasn't really successful, I didn't stay with it that long because I found out that I wasn't allowed to transfer to marketing after being in surveillance. That's one thing. Once you've been in surveillance, you can't really transfer to other parts of the casino. Certain things make more sense, like going from surveillance to soft counts there's a lot of room for potential corruption there. But yeah, marketing, I found out, wasn't an avenue after I'd been in surveillance.
URComped: Okay, so two big takeaways are try to get staff to tell you you won a lot more than you did and don't expect to launch a casino career by starting in surveillance.
SS: Also, don't work in surveillance at your favorite casino that you wanna gamble in. You aren't allowed to gamble at the casino for a certain amount of time after you've left surveillance. Because when you're in surveillance, you can't gamble at the casino that you're watching and that ban continues six months or a year after you leave. You can gamble at partner casinos within the tribe or nation or whatever, but you can't gamble at that casino while you're in surveillance.
URComped: Well, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much, Suzy!
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