So here's my story. My next-door neighbor is in prison, and is renting his house out to ex-con buddies so he can pay the property tax. This is not good for the neighborhood. Anyway, last year our house got robbed. Lost a Macbook and a bunch of other pawnable electronics. In response, I bought a couple of wireless webcams, and set them up to detect motion and stream images to a fileserver which was hidden way in the back of the TV cabinet. Behind the old Gamecube, I figured nobody's gonna dig that deep.
Six months later, my house got broken into again. TV was stolen, an iPad, and the downstairs security camera. The thief stole the camera, but he didn't find the fileserver, which had some entertaining shots of him poking around the living room, spotting the camera, and rushing to unplug it. I printed off the frame that showed his face most clearly and gave it to the cops. The next day, the "Find My iPad" feature activated, pinpointing the iPad in my neighbor's house. I called the cops, they didn't really understand the tech and showed up three hours later and didn't find anything. But they did pass the security cam picture around the station, one of them recognized the guy (low-tech facial recognition), they hauled him in, and he had the iPad on him. He confessed to robbing our house twice, plus a half-dozen other houses around town. And he told the cops about the upstairs window high above the back stairs that we didn't notice was unlocked.
So to those of you who say that in-home surveillance won't work because criminals are too stupid to show their faces, you're underestimating just how stupid criminals can be when heroin withdrawal is making their decisions for them. And to those of you who say that this is one step from Big Brother, the big difference is that it's *my* security camera, I can choose what to show the cops. And yes, I erase the images periodically just in case someone seizes or steals the file server.