Apartment building security cameras in Los Angeles

How many security cameras does an apartment building need?

Most Los Angeles apartment buildings land between 6 and 22 cameras, and larger podium buildings between 30 and 50. The count is decided by the building’s geometry, not by its unit count. Two 40-unit buildings can need eleven cameras and twenty-six cameras: one has a single door onto a courtyard and open parking, the other has two street entrances, a subterranean ramp, an alley gate and two elevator cores.

Count openings, not units. Walk the building in this order and the schedule builds itself:

• Every opening a person can pass through unescorted — street door, side gate, alley door, garage man-door, roof hatch. One camera minimum each.
• Every opening where you need to know who, not just that someone. Those get two cameras, for the reason set out in the next section.
• Every vehicle entrance: one camera for the scene, and a second, separate camera if you want licence plates.
• Every elevator lobby on every floor you care about — at minimum ground, each garage level and the top floor.
• Every corridor run longer than about 50 feet, viewed from the end people walk toward.
• Every space that holds value or generates disputes: mail and package room, laundry, bike storage, gym, pool gate, trash and recycling enclosure.
• Every garage level: two minimum, one down each drive aisle.

These are schedules we have quoted from, not a code requirement. Add cameras where your building has an actual loss history — the alley, the mail room, the one gate that keeps getting propped open.

The number that decides everything: pixels on the target

A camera does not have a “range.” It has a pixel density at a distance — how many pixels land across a face or a licence plate. The industry sizes that against one international standard, IEC/EN 62676-4. That standard changed. Edition 2.0 was published on 9 October 2025, and it roughly doubled the pixel density considered adequate to confirm who a person is.

The 2014 edition used the four DORI levels that still appear on almost every camera datasheet: Detection at 25 px/m, Observation at 63 px/m, Recognition at 125 px/m and Identification at 250 px/m — about 8, 19, 38 and 76 pixels per foot in the manufacturer conversions. The 2025 edition replaces them with a seven-step ladder, and the step meaning “confirm a known person or read a licence plate” — now called Validate — sits at 500 px/m, about 152 px/ft. What the old standard called Identification is now one rung lower, renamed Characterize.

Pixel density falls off linearly with the width of the scene, so doubling the required density halves the width a camera can cover. The DORI identification distance printed on the datasheet of the camera in your quote is still calculated on the 2014 number. Measured against the 2025 standard, the distance at which that camera can actually confirm a face is roughly half of it.

Read the next table as a width, not a distance. Measure the widest thing the camera has to see across, then check which column it falls in.

Scene width = horizontal pixels ÷ required pixels per foot, using 38.1, 76.2 and 152.4 px/ft. Real results are worse than the arithmetic when light is poor, the subject is moving or compression is heavy — the standard is a floor, not a promise.

Where each camera goes, and what job it is doing

Every position on a plan should carry one sentence saying what that camera is for. If it does not, it is decoration. This is the schedule we work from on a Los Angeles multifamily building; our camera placement checklist covers the same ground for houses and small commercial sites.

Cameras are only half of a multifamily system. The entry itself is usually an intercom and access control question, and the two should share one plan so that a door forced open produces both an event and a clip.

The garage is where most apartment camera designs fail

Four failures, all four foreseeable at design stage.

Headlights. Plates are retroreflective, so under headlights they are far brighter than the driver behind them. A camera exposed for the driver shows a white rectangle where the plate is; a camera exposed for the plate shows a black windscreen. One camera cannot do both jobs, which is why the schedule above lists two.

Concrete reflects infrared. IR bounces off a low pale ceiling straight back into the lens and washes the image out. On drive aisles, modest continuous white light beats a stronger IR illuminator — and it keeps the camera in colour, which is what makes clothing describable.

Cable distance. Power over Ethernet over copper runs out at 100 m (328 ft) including patch leads. Long subterranean levels need a switch in a locked enclosure mid-run, on the same battery backup as the recorder. Get that into the cabling plan before anyone quotes camera models.

No signal. Subterranean levels have no cellular service, so a cloud camera with an LTE fallback has no fallback. Keep the recorder on site and the path back to it wired.

Light decides your night footage — and LA already has a rule about it

Los Angeles does set a minimum security standard for apartment houses, and it is not about cameras. LAMC § 91.8607, as amended by Ordinance 185,587 effective 16 July 2018, states its purpose plainly: “to provide minimum security standards for tenants in existing apartment houses, except for residential condominiums as defined in this Code.” It requires owners to “provide lights and locks or metal bars or grilles” complying with the sections it names, and it bites at three moments: when the building is sold or exchanged; when a permit is issued for alterations, repairs or additions exceeding $10,000 in valuation; or on a determination by the Board under § 91.8108.3. It also provides that no cost incurred under the section may be charged to tenants of a property in the Rent Escrow Account Program.

Two consequences follow. A sale and a $10,000 permit are the two moments when an owner has both budget and access, which makes them the cheapest moments to pull camera cable. And lighting is the substrate the cameras sit on: most fixed cameras drop their IR-cut filter and switch to black and white somewhere between roughly 0.5 and 5 lux, and once they do you get “grey jacket” instead of a colour — and clothing colour is the first thing a responding officer asks for.

How long to keep footage, and what that costs in terabytes

There is no general California statute setting a retention period for an apartment building’s cameras. Thirty days is the usual choice because it survives the gap between an incident and a police report, and because it is where the neighbouring compliance regimes land — Los Angeles requires 30 days of restaurant and bar footage under its alcohol programmes, and California requires 90 days at licensed cannabis premises. For an HOA the number belongs in a written policy adopted by the board, not in an installer’s head.

Thirty days of continuous recording, computed not estimated: 4 Mbps = 43.2 GB per camera per day (1 GB = 1,000 MB, 24 hours a day). Add roughly 20% headroom on top of every figure above.

Motion-triggered recording on corridors and stairwells is how a modest recorder reaches 30 days honestly — but never apply it at entrances or the vehicle gate, where the first two seconds are the whole event. Older analogue systems being retrofitted to HD usually need the recorder replaced before retention is even discussable. And a recorder that fills up quietly and starts overwriting on day 11 is one of the most common faults we find on takeovers, so get the achieved retention stated in writing at handover and re-checked once a year.

Where cameras must not go, and why to turn the audio off

California Penal Code § 647(j)(1) makes it disorderly conduct — a misdemeanour — to view, “by means of any instrumentality, including, but not limited to, a periscope, telescope, binoculars, camera, motion picture camera, camcorder, mobile phone, electronic device, or unmanned aircraft system, the interior of a bedroom, bathroom, changing room, fitting room, dressing room, or tanning booth, or the interior of any other area in which the occupant has a reasonable expectation of privacy, with the intent to invade the privacy of a person or persons inside.” Paragraph (j)(3) covers concealed recording of a person who may be undressed in those same areas, and it says in terms that being the landlord is no answer: “Neither of the following is a defense to the crime specified in this paragraph: (i) The defendant was a cohabitant, landlord, tenant, cotenant, employer, employee, or business partner or associate of the victim, or an agent of any of these.” Section 647 was last amended by Stats. 2025, ch. 82, effective 1 January 2026.

In practice this is a lens-and-aim problem before it is a policy problem. The exposure is the amenity-deck camera that happens to frame a bedroom window, or the wide corridor lens that catches through an open doorway. Fix it at commissioning: walk every camera’s live view on site, privacy-mask anything that sees into a home, screenshot the masked views and attach them to the handover file. Our California camera and privacy guide goes further into the consent rules.

Audio is the trap. Penal Code § 632(a) makes it an offence to record a “confidential communication” without the consent of all parties, defined in § 632(c) as one carried on “in circumstances as may reasonably indicate that any party to the communication desires it to be confined to the parties thereto.” Two neighbours talking quietly in a lift lobby is exactly the conversation that argument gets built around, and most cameras and recorders ship with the microphone on. Unless you have a reason to record sound and signage saying so, have the installer disable audio on every channel and show you the setting.

Post notice at the entrances and in the garage. For an HOA the system is common-area equipment, so the Davis-Stirling Act (Civil Code §§ 4000–6150) is the governing frame and Civil Code § 4775 puts maintenance of common area components on the association — once the board knows a camera is down, the board owns it. Adopt a written policy covering who may view footage, how a request is made, retention, and who holds the passwords, and have association counsel review it. We install and maintain systems; we do not give legal advice.

How to get three quotes you can actually compare

Camera bids on the same building routinely differ by a factor of three, almost always because the scopes differ rather than the prices. Send every bidder the same ten lines and the difference becomes visible; our Los Angeles CCTV cost page covers the price bands themselves.

1. Camera count, with a marked-up floor plan showing each position and what it must see.
2. For each camera: make, model, resolution, lens or focal range, and mounting height.
3. The minimum illumination in colour mode, from each datasheet.
4. Which positions are specified to Validate (500 px/m) and which to Characterize (250 px/m).
5. Recorder model, total usable storage, and the retention in days at the settings quoted — in writing.
6. Continuous or motion-triggered recording, stated per camera.
7. Network path: switch model, PoE budget, cable type, and how runs over 100 m are handled.
8. Battery backup: what the recorder and switches sit on, and for how long.
9. Where footage lives — local, cloud or both — and whether anything stops working without a subscription.
10. Contractor licence class and number, and the name it is held under.

Verifying the licence, including ours

Two CSLB classifications come up for camera work in California. The C-7 Low Voltage Systems regulation (16 CCR § 832.07) names closed-circuit video systems directly and caps at 91 volts; the C-10 Electrical regulation (16 CCR § 832.10) carries no voltage ceiling. Monitored alarm work is licensed separately again — not by the CSLB but by the Bureau of Security and Investigative Services, as an Alarm Company Operator.

Innov8av holds a C-10 Electrical licence, CSLB #1043428, and a BSIS Alarm Company Operator licence, ACO 7755. We do not hold a C-7 and do not claim one. Check any number you are handed — ours included — at cslb.ca.gov and search.dca.ca.gov, ask for it in writing on the proposal, and ask for a certificate of insurance naming workers’ compensation as well as liability.