Another video clip from AreYouPayingEnough.com talking about our Kerrisdale showroom…

Provident was featured in the New York Times last week in Paul Sullivan’s follow-up article about home security.

Sullivan’s original column sparked a fair amount of drama within the security industry… some reasonable, most of it… not so much. In that first article, he pointed out that the majority of alarms fail to deliver much ‘security’.

Slow, or non-existent, alarm response coupled with what could most politely be referred to as ‘poor service’ has served to paint the alarm industry with a fairly negative brush.

I wrote my thoughts on the article in my last blog post… pointing out that the faults that Sullivan listed are actually worse than he described (fortunately, they are also all solvable… most effectively through five minute proofing).

I ended up speaking with him later in the week for a follow-up story that was prompted by the flood of feedback that he received.

Sullivan divided the people from whom he received feedback from as following into one of three groups: Technologists, Pessimists and Pragmatists. Fortunately, I was considered one of the Pragmatists.

Here’s an excerpt of where Provident is mentioned… (click here to read the full article)

“Michael Jagger, the president of Provident Security in Vancouver, British Columbia, said his company had a different model to respond to alarms: it has 6,000 customers but they all live in particular neighborhoods that the company monitors closely. As soon as an alarm goes off, one of the company’s cars responds in under five minutes, charging $35 unless the homeowner reports a false alarm.

Even though his company can respond quickly, he said, he still instructed clients on how to secure their valuables until someone arrived. His “five-minute fixes” were often ingenious and would work to confound any crook.

He suggested putting a deadbolt lock on your master bedroom. However unsightly this may be, he said master bedrooms are the first place burglars go to look for jewelry and money. While they could still break down the door, the lock will slow them.

Similarly, he suggested people with alarms put poles in their sliding glass doors that are two inches too short. That way, when the burglar tries to force the door open, he will trip the alarm but still be stuck outside. (People without alarms might try putting a thick washer at the top of the slider to keep the crook from lifting it off the track.)

To keep your high-end plasma-screen televisions on the wall, Mr. Jagger said people should use a bicycle lock to attach the TV to the mounting bracket. Yes, the burglars may still rip the TV off the wall, lock and all, but it will take them a bit of time. The same goes for bolting down computers and safes. If they’re not fastened to the floor they are easy to take out.

“An alarm is not a deterrent in and of itself – despite what most other security companies will try to suggest,” Mr. Jagger said. “Because we know that we can get to your place within five minutes, you need to ensure that from the point at which your alarm trips and sends us a signal, it will take a burglar at least five minutes to get to what you are trying to protect.”

Provident’s response time may be unique to its neighborhood model. But the notion of delaying burglars with these simple solutions could reduce what they steal from anyone’s home.”

The NY Times printed an article by Paul Sullivan on Saturday called ‘Weighing the Value of a Home Alarm System‘.

In the article, Sullivan points out one of the central tenets of this blog over the past six years… that the most important reason for paying for a monitored alarm is to generate an immediate response.

Sullivan argues that given a very high false alarm rate (he suggests 80% of alarms are false – although my experience puts that figure much closer to 98%) most Police departments cannot, or will not, provide priority response.

His article should give a lot of people reason to question the ‘value’ that they are receiving from their alarm.

Unfortunately, for the vast majority of alarm owners, the reality is even worse than what Sullivan describes.

Sullivan’s article is focused on the following five major points:

1. Issues with power failures;
2. Slow Police response times;
3. Insurance Discounts
4. Deterrent value is outweighed by cost of an alarm
5. Getting more than just burglary detection from an alarm

[This post addresses the first two points above... I'll post my comments on the last three issues later this week.]

Sullivan is correct in all of his criticisms about how most alarms work. However, not all companies handle these common issues in the same way.

Here are my thoughts on each of his points…

POWER FAILURES: “People may be surprised to learn that when they most need their security system to protect their house, they oftentimes cannot rely on it. Jackie Ostrander discovered that when a storm knocked out power to her home in Greenwich, Conn., for a week in March — too long for her backup battery to keep going. And it took her security company three weeks to restart her system.”

Virtually every alarm system on the market has the ability to communicate that power has been lost as well as if the back-up battery is low.

At Provident, we set-up all of our clients’ alarms to send every possible signal, not just alarms. As a result, as soon as power is interrupted, we receive a signal from each of our affected clients. Once the back-up battery starts to get low (after approximately 6-8 hours on most alarms that we’ve installed) the alarm will send us another signal.

At that point, we will attempt to contact our client to confirm that they are home and ask if they would like to replace the battery and/or implement additional security measures (such as mobile patrols or posting a guard) while the power is out. If we cannot get a hold of them, we will respond to the home and replace the back-up battery.

Most of our clients have standing instructions with us telling us what to do in the event that we cannot reach them.

The ‘power failure’ issue is really a ‘response issue’ and can be easily solved.

POLICE RESPONSE TIMES: “There are about 36 million security systems in the United States, half of them in homes. Revenue for the industry was $28.2 billion in 2009, according to the Installation Business Report, an annual security industry survey. So a lot of people apparently think their homes are going to be impervious to burglars.

But even when the systems are working properly, the police response times can be slow.

Stan Martin, executive director of the Security Industry Alarm Coalition, acknowledged as much. He said that in big cities like New York, Atlanta and Chicago, police could take 30 to 45 minutes to respond, while in smaller towns the best that could be hoped for was six to eight minutes.”

The truth is that in many cities, large and small, Police Departments are making the decision to not respond at all. For example, Police do not respond in Whistler, Salt Lake City or Fremont, California. Other cities, like Seattle, have implemented a misleadingly titled program called ‘Enhanced Call Verification‘.

Of those Police Departments that still respond, the response time is often far longer than just “30-45 minutes”. In Vancouver, the latest Patrol Deployment study showed that the average Police response time to an alarm is 2 hours and 6 minutes.

Sullivan goes on to point out that even when the Police do respond, it’s hardly a complete ‘service’…

“To combat false alarms, many police departments charge after the first or second one, he [Martin] said. In Stamford, Conn., for instance, the cost is $75. Yet these fines are often levied when a police car just drives past your house, not even pulling in the driveway, let alone walking around the property.”

The fact is that the alarm industry has gotten away with providing an incomplete service for a very long time. What other industry is able to sell a service that relies on a government agency in order to provide any value?  The alarm industry is very much a parasite on the Police … at least the traditional model of delivering alarm ‘service’ certainly is.

The most important  reason for paying for alarm monitoring is to generate an immediate response. That’s it. An alarm provides information that has an incredibly short shelf life in order to be of any value.

If the alarm signal being received is a ‘low battery’, what can the Police do about it? In many cases, the Police do not even know that the alarm they are responding to was a battery issue rather than an actual burglary signal.

The Police do not hold house keys and often do not know what exactly is ‘in alarm’… they just get told that there is an ‘alarm’.

Click below to watch a video clip from one of our home security seminars where I explain how Police response actually works… and why any incident is most likely long over before the Police even first hear of an alarm, let alone get a chance to start responding to it.

This is why at Provident, we do not make any verification calls.

When an alarm trips, we send our response teams to provide immediate response. We hold keys and we know exactly what the alarm is reporting… and what to do to correct it. If the Police are required, we call 911 from the site and report a crime in progress… a call that results in very fast Police response.

We guarantee a five minute response, but we also work to educate our clients than a security alarm is NOT a security ‘system’. An alarm is one part of your overall ‘system’ and should not be relied on as a stand-alone security tactic. As far as effective security tactics go, nothing beats Five Minute Proofing.

Without effective ‘Five Minute Proofing’ in place, an alarm is unlikely to provide any real value in minimizing loss during a burglary. The good news? Many Five Minute Proofing strategies are either free or very low cost.

Click below to hear more about Five Minute Proofing…

INSURANCE DISCOUNTS, DETERRENT VALUE and GOING BEYOND SECURITY…

This post seemed like it was going to be far too long. Definitely too long for a single post. If you’re still reading this far down the page… Thank you.

I’ll post the balance of my thoughts on the points Sullivan raised  later this week.

Just about every media outlet in North America has already reported on the burglary at one of Eli Lilly & Co.’s Connecticut warehouses this past weekend (here are the Wall Street Journal, NY Times and over 1,000 other versions). Most of the reports have focused on the fact that the crooks were able to get away with more than $75 million in prescription drugs, making it one of the biggest pharmaceutical heists in history.

The crooks gained entry to the warehouse by cutting a hole in the roof and then rappelling down into the warehouse. According to an ABC News report on the incident, once the crooks were inside they disabled the alarm and spent a couple hours loading pallets of drugs into at least one truck in the loading bay.

Here’s a video from a Hartford News station that explains what happened…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Other than the fact that that is an amazing amount of Prozac for someone to try to sell, the most interesting part of this story (for me at least) is the fact that the security failed so miserably.

Dan Gelinas is a journalist at Security Systems News and has been posting on his blog about the security angle in this story.

He’s chased down the Enfield, Connecticut Police Department and confirmed that they never received any request for dispatch from the warehouse’s alarm company.

From everything that’s been reported so far, it appears that the alarm system either did not work or, if it did, the alarm signals were ignored. Either way, whatever happened, it shouldn’t have… a properly designed security system would have detected the burglary and made a multi-hour heist impossible.

The incident is reminiscent of the 2008 heist at the UBC Museum of Anthropology where crooks got inside and stole fifteen priceless Bill Reid pieces of art, without triggering any kind of security or Police response. In that case, the Museum tried to suggest that, despite the theft, their security was working. I wrote about the incident in a couple blog posts here and here and outlined why I thought that was a crazy statement to make.

Here’s a video clip from Global TV in Vancouver about that burglary (I talk about  some of the ways that artwork, or anything, can be protected at the 2:43 mark).

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the Museum’s case, the final story ended up being that the crooks were able to circumvent all of the security technology by simply calling ahead and asking for any alarm signals to be ignored. Seriously.

There are a few security measures that should have been in place to prevent either of these incidents from happening…

Your security is in your redundancy…

Whether you are protecting your home, a corner store or a warehouse where you have $75 million dollars worth of Prozac, you cannot afford to have a single point of failure.

Your security is in your redundancy. That means that you need to have multiple lines of detection: contacts on every door and window, glassbreak sensors, motion detectors and shock sensors are required throughout.

Most importantly, an alarm should not rely on a single form of communication. If the only way that an alarm sends a signal is over the telephone lines, and that phone line gets cut (or unplugged from the inside) the alarm will not communicate.

At Provident, we use BLINK mesh radio to provide an almost instantaneous wireless signal to be sent for every alarm in our client’s homes and businesses. We use the telephone line as a back-up communication method which ensures that we receive every alarm signal twice… and if a crook cuts a phone line, it will not have any impact on the alarm’s ability to send a signal.

Protection against system tampering…

As just one example, many options exist for motion detectors that are equipped with ‘anti-masking’ technology which detects attempts to block a motion detector with spray paint, or anything. Here’s an example of one detector from Honeywell that will prevent tampering.

Similarly, options exist for almost every type of device (and the wiring) to be protected against tampering.

Ensuring that there is no single point of failure… and not relying on a single detector for any one area… will also significantly increase security.

Regular testing of the alarm… where every single device is inspected and tripped will also reduce your risk.

Protection against an inside job…

Just because a burglar has a little help from the inside (or if the burglar is already an insider) there is no need to make it any easier for them to steal your stuff.

To start with, every person who uses your alarm should have their own, unique, alarm code. If you have a housekeeper who only works on Wednesdays, or daytime staff in your office who should never need to be at work at 2:00am, their alarm codes should restrict them to the times that they are allowed to access your property.

The vast majority of alarms are capable of restricting users access by time of day. Why give out 24 hour access if it’s not required.

I’ve written a few posts on this topic, including…

Fresh Milk and Why Your Alarm Should Not Share

Your alarm should not share

Protection against forgetfulness…

The fact that an alarm user has forgotten to arm the alarm in your store or office by accident, or on purpose, does not need to result in your belongings being left unmonitored and ready for easy pick-up by crooks.

Every alarm company offers a service called ‘Supervision’ which means that if your alarm is not set by a certain time each day, a signal is sent to our Operations Centre to be followed up on.

We provide this service to many of our clients to ensure that closing staff have locked up and armed the alarm by a certain time each night. Likewise, if the alarm hasn’t been disarmed by a certain time in the morning (meaning that noone has opened the store yet) that will also create an alarm signal in our Operations Centre.

Either way, you’re protected against human error that could leave you unprotected.

I wrote about this service in a post about Lindsay Lohan’s burglary last year.

Five minute proofing…

The most effective tactic that you can use to minimize your risk of being a victim of burglary is to five-minute proof your important belongings.

In the Eli Lilly case, even one-hour proofing looks like it would’ve worked.

Five-minute proofing is the culmination of many different security tactics where the goal is to ensure that from the point at which the alarm is tripped, it would take a crook at least five minutes to get to your most precious belongings.

The first step to successful five-minute proofing is to push your alarm detection out as far as possible… ideally, you want to detect the crook while he is still on the outside, rather than waiting for him to get inside.

In the Eli Lilly case, video cameras using video analytics… or even outdoor beams installed on the roof could have offered an early warning about what was going on.

It will be interesting to hear the rest of the story about what actually happened in Connecticut as details are released.

The security industry doesn’t have a great reputation for honesty.

Whether it’s unscrupulous door-to-door “sales”, aggressive sales practices, outright deception, misleading advertising or simply the fact that most alarm monitoring services could best be described as ‘incomplete’ the security industry hasn’t earned a very good reputation. It’s too bad because there are certainly many alarm companies in North America who provide great (and honest) service and are working hard to improve our industry.

As is the case in every industry, their will always be shady operators, but it’s frustrating when some of the biggest players, who are in a position to lead in a positive manner, do things that only add to the mistrust and bad reputation that the security industry has.

Case in point: Broadview Security (formerly Brinks Home Security) television commercials. They are ridiculous.

Being ridiculous wouldn’t be so bad if the message  they’re  selling wasn’t so serious.  In my opinion, their new commercials represent the worst kind of fear-based marketing.  More importantly, the ads are very misleading. The vast, vast majority of alarms simply do not work the way they are portrayed in the commercials (and certainly none of the $99.00 systems work that way).

Click below to watch the first ad, called “The Ex”…

Unfortunately, many people do not know how the alarm industry actually works… let alone what happens when an alarm trips. Rather than perpetuating false stereotypes about alarm systems, Broadview Security is doing the entire alarm industry a disservice with these reprehensible advertisements. As a Security company owner, these ads are simply embarrassing to watch. As an average consumer who doesn’t know how alarm monitoring service works, they could be very dangerous.

Beyond simply being offensive in general, here are a few specific reasons why this commercial should be pulled:

1. When the angry ex-boyfriend kicks in the door, the alarm instantly sounds.

Given that the woman had just armed the alarm less than a second before, the exit delay would have still been counting down.

The ‘exit delay’ is the time between when you arm the alarm, and the time that it actually ‘sets’. This delay is in place to allow you to arm your alarm and then get out of your home & lock your door without creating a false alarm every time.

The ‘exit delay’ can be customized, but in most cases it’s set for between 45 and 60 seconds.

With the way that almost every single alarm system that I have ever encountered in my career, if the scenario played out in the commercial happened in real-life, there likely would have been about 30 seconds left in the ‘countdown’ before the alarm was actually set… let alone triggered.

As a result, in the commercial when the ex-boyfriend broke in, the alarm would still have been counting down & no alarm would be tripped until the countdown was finished and the alarm was actually armed. Even then, most alarms are configured to send what’s called an ‘Entry/Exit’ alarm which treats alarms created within a very short time of the system being armed differently than an alarm that is tripped hours later.

Either way, with or without an exit delay time, the alarm simply doesn’t work that fast.

2. Once the alarm gets triggered the phone starts ringing immediately.

In fact, before the woman even has a chance to make it halfway up the stairs, the phone inside the house is ringing and it’s Broadview Security on the line wanting to know if everything is ok.

Once an alarm is tripped, it will still take AT LEAST 30 seconds for the alarm signal to be sent to the central monitoring station using the telephone line. The alarm needs this time to seize the phone line, dial the long distance number for the central monitoring station, connect with the receivers there and then transmit the alarm data. This process, using a telephone line, takes at least 30 seconds. Once the alarm signal is received, it will take more time for the signal to be presented to an operator who will then make a call back to the premises.

In addition, the alarm uses the telephone line to communicate with the central station. For as long as the signal is being sent, usually at least  30 seconds, the phone line is not available to call in or out.

Unless the woman in the commercial has two telephone lines, she won’t be able to use the phone right away…  either to receive a phone or make her own emergency call to 911 because the alarm system will be using the line to send the alarm signals.

The bottom line is that alarms simply do not work this way. A properly designed alarm can be a very important part of your overall security plan, but it is not a cure-all solution. A $99.00 (or any)  alarm will not save you from a stalker who is motivated and committed to breaking into your home.

While it is certainly possible to speed up how fast an alarm can send a signal (for example, by using BLINK monitoring) or minimizing the risk of dead phone lines by having a dedicated line for your alarm, none of these options are available for anything close to $99.00

This commercial is akin to seeing a car advertisement for a beautiful new car with every conceivable option (plus a couple that don’t exist at all) for an incredibly low price. But when you go to the dealership to pick up that new car you bought based on the ad you saw, you’re given an old bicycle with a flat tire and cracked frame. When you complain that the bike looks and operates a lot differently than that car in the commercial, you’re told that everything you saw on TV is actually not included in the pricing that was mentioned. Car companies aren’t allowed to do that. In fact, in every car ad I’ve seen the small print on the screen makes it clear that they are showing a specific model with specific options. Why doesn’t the security industry point out that the images you see have little or no relevance to the price that is advertised?

If you have a specific security threat/risk, like the character in the commercial, a $99.00 alarm is not going to do anything for you other than cost you money. To suggest that it will provide protection against a motivated criminal who is targeting you is irresponsible and simply wrong. Broadview Security knows this… they’re just hoping that most North Americans won’t.

–

In the spirit of belaboring the point just a little longer, it’s not like this is the only commercial that Broadview/Brinks has run like this. Far from it, in fact, it’s more of a specific formula that they use in most of their ads in order to terrify people into shelling out $99.00 plus a monthly monitoring fee.

Here’s a selection of some of their other TV spots vying for the ‘Most Offensive’ title:

This one is called ‘Backyard’ and shows a mother with her daughter going in for lunch… and instant arming the second that they do. Like “The Ex” the bad-guy breaks in a second after they’ve gotten into the house but takes off as soon as he hears the alarm sound. Broadview makes the magically quick call to assure the woman that they’ll get right on to calling someone else to help.

This one’s called “New Home”, and preys on the fear of a night-time burglary when everyone is asleep… despite the fact that the vast majority of residential burglaries happen mid-day … and after an attempt to verify that the house is empty…

Or this one, called “Wrong Door”. Not sure why the burglar would spend so long trying the door knob, I suppose just for dramatic effect…

Or this one, called ‘Treadmill’ where the alarm scares off the two burglars (dressed like they just got off of a set where they were playing burglars in a movie) who again are targeting a woman, alone in her home at night…

Or this beauty, that shows the same bad-guy, all dressed in black who sees the family inside and then decides to smash out a large window with a crowbar before running off at the sound of the alarm…

Here’s another black leather jacket clad burglar smashing a window while a young mother and her kids are alone at home…

This one is called “montage”… and plays like the trailer for a really bad horror movie…

If this is what one of the largest, and most successful alarm companies puts out, it’s no wonder that so many others in the industry figure it’s ok to mislead people.

Here are a few links to other posts that I’ve written that fit in with this topic…

10 Reasons Why Most Home Alarms are Useless (and what you should do about it)

“The Alarm Industry is a Parasite on the Police”

Why Police Response to Burglar Alarms Doesn’t Work

Fox 12 in Portland reported a story today about a pair of burglars who Police believe may be posing as door-to-door Window Salesmen.

The video clip of the story implies that the impostors never got inside of the victim’s home, but a couple of days after their visit, a Portland homeowner had his safe targeted in a burglary.

Irrespective of who actually committed the burglary, the notable part of the story was the fact that the victim was keeping $13,000.00 cash in a safe that he had bolted down in his master bedroom closet.

Here’s an excerpt from the story…

On Tuesday, Lee said he found his home trashed. Thieves stole rare coins, jewelry and $13,000 from his safe. Lee said the burglars broke in through a door and used tools from his garage to break into his safe.

“I had it bolted to the floor,” he said. “Evidently, it wasn’t as safe as I thought it was.”

There are few lessons from this story… the first two are the same as in my post about the Apple Store in New Jersey getting emptied in 31 seconds:

(1) You CANNOT make it physically impossible for someone to break in; and

(2) Five-Minute Proofing is the most important security tactic.

Of course, the most fundamental lesson is that you should not keep large amounts of cash in your home… put it in the bank. If you decide that you want to keep cash at home, by all means, put it in a safe and bolt it down. But, if you do not have a monitored alarm that will alert responders that someone is trying to get at your safe… they can take as much time as it takes to remove it.

The time that it takes to remove a safe is a lot less than most people think. Safes, even really, really heavy safes, are only difficult to move around when you are trying to be careful not to damage the walls (or anything else). If you don’t care about making a mess or breaking anything, moving a safe isn’t that hard. Just ask Lindsay Lohan.

Relying on a safe, just like relying on an alarm, often provides a false sense of security. Your security is in your redundancy. It’s all about putting multiple steps/tactics/measures in place.

If you have a safe, but do not have it monitored, you might want to think about how important the things that you have inside of it are. You might be better off spreading your valuables all over your home rather than keeping them all together in one easily movable box.

SIDE NOTE: In the video, the reporter mentions that the homeowner thinks that the impostors were looking for “window burglar alarm tape” on the windows. That’s fairly unlikely given that foil is rarely part of an alarm system that has been installed in the past 25 years.

If they were looking at the windows, it’s much more likely that they were simply looking through them in order to see if there was anything of obvious value that was easily reachable inside.

If they were savvy enough to look for alarm equipment, they would have simply cut the telephone lines.

Police in Marlton, New Jersey are looking for five suspects that broke into an Apple Store and made off with a few dozen Macbooks.

Click below to watch a news clip showing the brazen smash & grab that took just 31 seconds for the thieves to clean the store out of almost every display model.

Although the store had a Security Guard on duty, the crooks were able to smash the front glass doors and each took an ‘aisle’ in the store to grab every MacBook on display. Apparently, one of the crooks motioned to the Guard that he had a gun… forcing the Guard to back-off and not try to intervene at all.

As pointed out by the (incredibly annoying) reporter in the newsstory, the CCTV system in the store did not offer any deterrent value as the thieves simply covered their faces while they were in sight of the cameras.

Beyond the reminder that a CCTV system is not a deterrent, this smash & grab offers a few lessons:

1. You cannot make it physically impossible for someone to break in

If someone wants to try and break into your home or business, there is very little that you can do to make it physically impossible. If they want in, they’ll get in eventually. The trick is to put appropriate security measures in place that help make it easy for a potential burglar to make a decision not to bother with your place.

If you have a full-time security guard, extensive camera system or a big dog in your house, if a crook decides that he wants to try to get in anyways… he will. It’s the combination of the appropriate security measures that provide real security.

Your goal is to create enough perceived hassle for a crook that they make up their own mind that your store, or home, is not worth the effort.

2. Five-Minute Proofing is the most important security tactic

Five-Minute Proofing is the single most effective security tactic that you can implement in your home or business. Simply put, Five-Minute Proofing means that you ensure that, from the point at which the alarm is tripped, it would take a crook at least five minutes to get to what you are trying to protect.

In the case of this particular Apple Store, the store should have been equipped with glassbreak detectors near the front doors. More importantly, the glass panels themselves should have been laminated glass… or at least had security film on them, so that they wouldn’t smash so easily.

That way, when the crooks made their first attempt to smash the glass, the glassbreak detectors (if they were installed correctly) would hear the sound of the glass being attacked and trip the alarm. Alternatively, the camera system could have been set-up to trip an alarm due to someone standing at the front door for too long after-hours.

By designing the alarm to trip while the crooks are still outside, the Police could have been immediately called by the Security Guard to report what was happening and the alarm monitoring company would also be immediately able to assist. If the alarm monitoring company were monitoring the camera system, they could also relay the suspects exact descriptions, in real time, to the Police.

Beyond the front glass, there should be a second layer of physical security inside the store to help slow the crooks down. Expanding gates are often used for this purpose and are best installed several feet away from the front of the store. That way, if the crooks were able to eventually break through the glass to get in the store, they would then need to contend with getting around the expanding gates. Your security is in your redundancy.

Going a step further, each of the MacBooks could easily be locked down… not to make them impossible to steal, but ensuring that noone could simply grab a couple dozen of them in half a minute.

It’s not about making it physically impossible to get in… it’s about putting enough impediments into a potential crooks’ way that he is (or they are) unable to get to your valuables quickly.

If those three (the alarm, laminated glass and an expanding gate) Five Minute Proofing measures had been in place in this particular Apple Store, both the Security Guard and Alarm Monitoring company would have had a reasonable chance to call 911 and report a crime in progress.

The store would have had a damaged front door, but they would not have risked the safety of the security guard or had to worry about five crooks who learned how easy it is to break into their store and clean them out.

Click the video below to watch an excerpt from a recent ‘Preventing Burglary’ seminar where I explain Five Minute Proofing and give a few other examples.

Click below to watch a short clip from the CTV News last night regarding an initiative by the Vancouver Public Space Network to count the number of surveillance cameras in Downtown Vancouver. According to the VPSN website, the purpose of the count is to “inform the public, and to discuss surveillance issues with city hall and the police. We will also use the maps to create an art installation sometime in the fall..”

I’m quite confident that whatever number that they end up with, it will still be much lower than the actual number.

The image quality of most new surveillance cameras is increasing almost as fast as equipment costs are coming down. As a result, the number of cameras in both public and private spaces will only increase. With or without the 2010 Olympics, there will be many more cameras in Vancouver by this time next year. The vast majority of them will be installed on private property, but will be viewing (at least partially) public spaces. I don’t see any reason why this trend will not continue.

the ‘privacy’ issue

In terms of the privacy concerns, I believe that the law is already pretty clear. You cannot film someone where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Therefore, no filming in washrooms, changing rooms, staffrooms or other similar places. Anyone who gets caught violating people’s privacy in that way can face some serious consequences. “Privacy” in a public space… like a sidewalk or storefront is a very different matter and hasn’t existed in a very long time.

The real question is how is all of this technology is being used… and, most importantly, is it offering any real value in preventing crime.

I’ve posted on this blog before about why the vast majority of CCTV installations do not provide a deterrent to crime. The reality is that most CCTV systems simply provide a really frustrating video recording of your stuff being stolen… which you’ll watch hours after the crime occurred.

In the CTV clip below, I demonstrate how using video analytics can help turn a ‘regular’ CCTV system into a much more effective crime prevention tool by analyzing suspicious behaviour. By doing so, the CCTV system stops being a passive recorder of activity and, instead, becomes a pro-active tool that alerts responders to criminal activity just as it’s starting… not simply providing a record of it hours after it’s over.

We use this technology for many of our residential and commercial clients. In the example shown in the CTV clip, the system is programmed to detect someone standing right up against our showroom windows. Anytime this happens, the system creates an alarm (in the same manner that a motion detector or glassbreak sensor would trip an alarm on the inside) and a signal is sent to our 24/7 Operations Centre where our team can immediately review the live video and determine if a response is required.

We have this technology set up on clients property to create alarms whenever someone climbs over a fence, in retail stores when someone is standing for too long in front of the door after-hours as well as in office towers to detect unusual activity in hallways when the building is supposed to be empty.

Without question, the technology allows us to offer a much higher level of security for our clients and eliminates the need for a human being to sit and watch hours of live video footage in the hopes of watching a crime transpire.

Of course, like most other technology, it’s all about the human response.

Unless someone is set-up to provide immediate response to what has been detected, it’s of little value. That’s where our guaranteed five minute response comes in. Video analytics can be a very important part of your overall security system… often, using analytics allows us to respond to an alarm while a crook is still thinking of breaking in rather than after he has already successfully gained access.

Click here to view the embedded video.

On Wednesday morning, a Westside business learned the hard way why Police response does not work.

At about 3:45am, crooks smashed a pane of glass and forced open a set of expandable bars to steal some movies, video games and gaming consoles.

The alarm did not trip until after the bars had been forced open and the burglar(s) walked in front of a motion detector inside the store. When the alarm company received the signal, they followed typical procedures by calling the store and then the emergency contacts.

Because they were unable to get an answer from any of the emergency contacts, they were unable to dispatch the Police to request a response due to the Vancouver City By-Law which does not allow for alarm companies to request Police response until after an emergency contact has been reached.

No contact was reached… so no Police response could be requested.

As a result, the store remained wide open… accessible to the world until someone noticed the broken glass and called Police several hours later.

The store was very lucky… if the crooks who had broken in had been smart, or patient, enough to watch for any response to their initial burglary, they could have easily cleaned out the entire store, displays and all. They certainly would have had enough time to do it.

Unfortunately, incidents like this happen all of the time.

There are several things that could have been done to minimize the loss incurred during this burglary:

1. Get private response

Police response to burglar alarms simply does not work. I’ve written extensively about this issue (click here, here or here for a few examples).

By assuming that all alarms are false until proven otherwise completely eliminates any real value that an alarm can offer. Having a private and immediate response service in place would have at least ensured that someone was going to be responsible for attending to the alarm and make sure that the store would not be left wide open for hours;

2. Detect the ‘break’ not the ‘enter’

The alarm should have been configured to trip the second that the glass was broken. Instead, because the alarm system relied on an interior motion detector as the first detection point, the alarm did not trip until after the glass was broken and the bars had been disabled.

A properly installed glassbreak detector would have ensured that an alarm signal was sent while the crooks were still standing outside… which may have been enough to encourage them to change their plans. All of the effort required to break into a premises occurs while the crook is still standing OUTSIDE… the alarm must be configured to detect that. Once they are inside, they are moving quickly and it is very unlikely that response will be fast enough to catch them in the act. Detect the ‘break’ not the ‘enter’.

Burglaries like this do not need to happen.

Your security is in your redundancy. Installing bars is not good enough. Neither is an alarm. In fact, just about anything by itself isn’t going to be very effective… your security comes from building multiple levels of detection & security so that your different security measures work together to create actual security. The individual components on their own are almost never good enough. It doesn’t need to be expensive… but it does need to be well thought out. In this case, a bit of extra money spent on private response as well as one glassbreak detector would have saved a significant loss from occurring.

We had another full showroom last night for our ‘Preventing Burglary’ seminar. We’ve received a lot of great feedback from people about the seminar…. but up until today, we’ve never had a video testimonial from someone who attended.

Ian Watt is a Vancouver Realtor focused on the Downtown Condo market who has become famous for his daily video blog posts that he films while driving around Vancouver. Ian attended last week’s seminar and we’re glad that he had good things to say about us (because as anyone who has watched any of Ian’s videos will attest, we’re pretty sure that he’d happily film a video saying he hated it if he felt that way).

Provident Security Seminar Keeping Vancouver Townhouse Owners Safe from Ian Watt Vancouver Condo on Vimeo.

Our next home security seminar will be held on Tuesday, January 13th in our Kerrisdale Showroom … please come by around 6:45pm for some wine and cheese… the presentation will begin at 7:00pm.

Click here to read some comments from past attendees.

Every seminar that we have held over the past few months has sold out early… although it’s free to attend, we do have limited space.

If you’d like to attend, please click here to RSVP.

The Seattle Police Department recently announced that, effective January 1st, they will become one of the largest major police departments to mandate that alarm companies must place two verification calls to customers before contacting police.

From the SPD release…

Alarm companies are also required to use enhanced call verification (ECV) for all burglary alarms.  ECV is a monitoring procedure requiring that the alarm company, prior to making an alarm dispatch request, make a minimum of two phone calls.  This is done by calling the location of the alarm first and then a secondary number determined by the subscriber, often a cell phone number.  ECV is only required for burglary alarms, not hold-up or panic alarms. Beginning January 1, 2009, the Seattle Police Department will not respond to requests from alarm companies to dispatch officers to a monitored burglary alarm when the alarm company has not utilized ECV.

Given that just about every alarm is false, this policy makes a lot of sense for the police… unfortunately, it doesn’t offer anything to alarm owners other than serving to make their monitored alarm systems even less effective.

The branding of the two-call verification as ‘Enhanced’ allows alarm companies to try and hoodwink customers into believing that the practice is somehow an improvement, or at least in their favour. The reality is, ECV all but ensures that in the event of an actual burglary, noone will be able to respond in a meaningful amount of time to have any impact.

Using ECV, or doing anything between the time an alarm signal is received and the time someone is dispatched to attend, is a waste. While ECV will further reduce the number of false dispatches to the SPD (which is great for Seattle taxpayers) it still allows the alarm industry to continue the misleading practice of promoting ECV as something that is good for them.

The SPD should adopt a non-response policy.

Rather than making a policy change which helps (inadvertently) facilitate deceptive sales practices, why not just come out and say that because 98% of alarms are false, the police will no longer respond unless an alarm has been verified to be real?

Alarm companies would be forced to be much more honest with their clients about what will happen when the alarm trips. More importantly, the ability to get away with selling an incomplete service will dry up.

There is a pretty major lobby from the security industry to fight a move like that… but it’s the right thing to do.

Incidentally, the Vancouver Police policy actually goes a little further than Seattle in that the Vancouver Security Alarm System Bylaw No.7111 (s.27) says that “Before notifying the Police Department of an alarm incident… an alarm company MUST contact by telephone or other electronic means, in order to establish whether the incident is a false alarm”. The word ‘must’ was recently added to replace the word ‘attempt’.

The subtle difference is that in Seattle, the alarm company only has to attempt to reach a client at two different numbers, whereas in Vancouver the alarm company must reach them.

As the false alarm problem continues to plague police departments and police operating budgets get tighter, the eventual move is to finally adopt a policy that requires verification before the police can be called. That’s not good for the status quo in the alarm industry, but it will be good for pretty much everyone else… most importantly the consumer.

At least then the consumer can make an informed choice about what type of security they want for their home or business and not be under any false impression that the Police will be coming in the event an alarm sounds.