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Tesla Sentry Mode helps police identify burglars who stole a doctor’s prescription pad and more

Tesla’s Sentry Mode, which was developed to help with a string of Tesla vehicle break-ins, has helped police identify burglars who broke into a doctor’s Model S in Los Angeles and stole his stuff, including a prescription pad.

Building on its previously released dashcam feature, Tesla enabled the use of more cameras around its vehicles and activated a “stand-by” parking mode.

The feature became Sentry Mode, which also includes an alarm and notification system to deter thieves even more — efficiently creating a system to watch over Tesla vehicles when their owners are not around.

It has been useful for helping Tesla owners that have been victims of vandalism.

Earlier this year, a Tesla owner posted a video of two men keying his car for no apparent reason and the men turned themselves in after the video went viral.

We also posted last week a video captured by Tesla Sentry mode of another vandalism incident on a Model 3.

But it was first developed to address a growing problem with break-ins that Tesla owners were dealing with especially in California last year.

Nishant Patel, a Santa Clarita urologist, said that his 2017 Tesla Model S was burglarized on July 24 in downtown Los Angeles.

NBC Los Angeles reported:

“He had stopped to eat at a restaurant, and when he returned to his car, the front right window was shattered. His bag, which contained his computer, his checkbook, and an expired prescription pad, was missing from the back seat.”

If there’s a real threat detected by Tesla’s Sentry mode, the system will send a notification to your phone.

Patel said that he missed the notification, but when he got back to his car, he saw that a window was broken and his bag was missing.

He checked his Sentry mode video and found that it clearly showed the two people who stole his property.

NBC released some footage from the Sentry mode video:

The doctor gave the police the footage and they said that they were able to identify the two suspects. They will update him on the arrests.

Patel said that his Model S was its own police officer. He told NBC:

“For some reason, they thought this was the best target. They picked the wrong car. If you’re a crook, you might want to think twice about breaking into a Tesla,”

Beyond vandalism and break-ins, Tesla’s Sentry mode has also captured some strange events.

We gathered some of them in our post: Tesla’s millions of cameras are capturing some crazy things.

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Avatar for Fred Lambert Fred Lambert

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