There is a big difference between residential burglaries in Vancouver and those in Whistler.

While the typical residential burglary in the city follows a consistent pattern that starts with a kicked-in front door, most thefts in Whistler seem to be committed by people with access to both a key and alarm code.

Coming home to a burglarized home is a lot more obvious when your front door has been kicked in. In Whistler, just because your door is locked and your alarm is armed doesn’t mean all of your belongings are exactly as you left them.

Three recent stories from clients (each of which occurred before they became Provident clients in Whistler) illustrate some of the security risks for Whistler, or vacation properties anywhere…

The ‘Who the hell are you?’ incident…

A Whistler homeowner who lives in the United States happened to be in Vancouver on a recent weekend. When their Saturday night plans fell through, they decided to head up to their Whistler cabin rather than stay in a hotel downtown.

When they walked through their front door in Whistler a little after 11pm, they were shocked to find their home already occupied. After a curt exchange of “who are you’s?”, it was determined that the people in the home were not burglars. It turned out they were renters who had paid in full for a week in the cabin.

It wasn’t a burglary, it was fraud.

To the surprise of the owner, their trusted, long-time cleaning lady had been renting out their cabin for several years. Because she had always been privy to the actual rental schedule, given she did pre & post cleans, she was able to develop a lucrative side gig of renting the cabin out on Craigslist for cash.

The ‘How was the wine?’ incident…

An owner arrived in Whistler and was dismayed to see two empty bottles from his special collection of wines (the cheaper of which was worth about $650) in the recycling bin. Given the fact that he was not using the alarm system at the time of the incident, he had no way of knowing who had accessed his home and enjoyed his wine.

The ‘That’s disgusting’ incident…

The third incident involved another client who arrived at their Whistler home to find their hot tub broken and a few things out of place inside the house. What really set the owners off, however, was finding a condom wrapper under the bed in their master bedroom.

With a lockbox outside the house, the code for which is known by several local service providers, determining who was ‘enjoying’ their home in their absence was not possible.

In my experience, the attitude towards security in Whistler tends to be on the extremes… people seem to be either incredibly security conscious and want to put every possible measure in place, or they leave a key in a lockbox, subscribing to the idea that “there’s nothing to steal anyways”.

As more incidents like these occur, people are tending to move from the ‘there are no security issues in Whistler’ camp, directly to the ‘we have a major security problem in Whistler’ camp. The reality is that the risk in Whistler is very easy to manage. Crooks are taking advantage of the most basic weaknesses in people’s security.

The solutions are simple:

1. Stop sharing your alarm code.

Every user of your alarm system should have a unique code. There is no reason to share user codes.

Right now is a perfect time to change your alarm codes. All of them.

Provident can remotely add, modify or delete user codes for your alarm at anytime upon your request. We can also provide detailed user reports that outline exactly who accessed your home, and when, at any time (or set up a regular report to be emailed to you every day, week, month or other frequency you would prefer).

Click here to learn why controlling alarm codes is such an important first step.

2. Get rid of your lockbox.

While it may be convenient to have a lockbox outside your Whistler home, there is very little security. Given that most Whistler homeowners are away from their homes for extended periods of time (or most of the time), there is little stopping an unscrupulous service provider who has been given access to your lockbox once (or gained easy access using a hammer) from making a duplicate copy for future use.

Provident provides 24/7 key control and can respond at any time to provide a key to anyone who requires legitimate access to your home. There is no need to leave your keys, unsecured, outside your home.

Everyone likes to be able to trust people, but nobody likes to be taken advantage of. By making it clear, up front, that you take security seriously in your Whistler home (by ensuring each of your service providers understand that the alarm code you give them is unique to them and will create an indelible record) our experience has been that people have far fewer problems than those who simply hope for the best and assume that everyone they deal with will be completely honest with them.

Our first Preventing Burglary seminar of the fall will be held in our Kerrisdale Showroom this Thursday, September 29th at 6:45pm.

In addition to learning exactly how residential burglaries occur on the Westside (and what you can do to eliminate your risk of being a victim of one), we’ve added a lot of new content such as how to use your burglar alarm to detect flooding as well as how to integrate your alarm with your heating system to reduce your energy costs each month.

Our seminars are always well attended and are a lot more fun & interesting than you would imagine a seminar on home security would be. Trust us. You should come. Bring your neighbours.

In addition to walking out with actionable steps that will have an immediate positive impact on your home security, we will also have some great wine from our friends at Le Vieux Pin Winery and cheese from Benton Brothers Cheese in Kerrisdale.

After the seminar (which will last about an hour), we’ll lead a tour through our 24/7 Operations Centre so that you can see what is on the other end of all of our client’s alarms and camera systems.

To RSVP, please click here.

Bring along a friend or neighbour and learn why five-minute proofing is the most effective measure you can take to improve your home security as well as why several of the tactics you are probably already using may be having the opposite effect that you intended.

Here’s what past attendees of our seminar have said:

“I particularly liked reiteration of the information about how to delay a burglar for 5 minutes. The tour of the operations facility was very interesting and confidence building”.

“I felt at ease. Information was useful.”

“I found it interesting and informative and I’m sure others would as well …. whether they have a system or not. It helps to stay current with crime trends and security options.”

“with all the home security advertising, I think it can be somewhat confusing for people and your session helped to clear up some issues”

We hope to see you on Thursday! Click here to RSVP.

The heat map above (click the map for a bigger image) shows that there were forty-six (46) residential burglaries reported last week to the Vancouver Police Department. Fifteen (15) of those were on the Westside.

One of the trends we’ve seen this summer already is a marked increase of thieves cutting telephone lines before breaking in. Unless wireless communication is being utilized (for example BLINK mesh radio monitoring), cutting the phone lines disables the vast majority of burglar alarms in people’s homes.

In terms of theft from vehicles, there were one-hundred and fifty six (156) reported incidents in the city, approximately forty-six (46) occurred on the Westside.

There were twenty-seven (27) vehicles stolen last week, six (6) of which were taken from the Westside.

All statistics and maps are from the Vancouver Police Department.

Watch the clip below to see a demonstration of how any camera can be turned into an intelligent motion detector through the use of video analytics.

There are many options for adding video analytics to an existing camera system… and when done appropriately, basic analytics can significantly improve the level of security offered by a CCTV system.

Some of the scenarios where we have installed video analytics for our clients include:

• to detect someone walking in an area of their yard (veering off of the main path) that they are not supposed to be;
• to send an alarm if someone is standing too close to the front of a store window/front door after hours;
• to alert security guards about someone in a parkade during specific hours;
• to count the number of people coming into (and out of) a store during the day;

In the case of burglary prevention, getting an early warning about someone trespassing makes a huge difference for our response teams. Now, rather than waiting for a detector in the house to trip, we can receive an alarm signal while a potential burglar is still outside.

While our response team is enroute, our monitoring team in our Operations Centre is able to keep an eye on exactly what is happening and help coordinate both our own response as well as get the Police involved as quickly as possible if required.

We’ve got everything set-up and installed in our Kerrisdale showroom. If you have any interest in learning more about when/where CCTV may be appropriate for you, please stop by and get a demonstration.

Given that the majority of our new clients come to us AFTER they’ve been the victim of a burglary (and learned that the security they thought they had in place didn’t work as expected), we recently launched a new website at AreYouPayingEnough.com to help get people to think about their home security proactively.

We built the site to point out the differences between Provident Security and every other provider. The most important of which is the fact that Provident is the only company that guarantees to be at your door within five minutes.

One of the key elements in our ability to provide immediate response is that we own and operate our own central monitoring station in Kerrisdale. Because we monitor our own alarms, we are able to control every single step in our process… from the alarm being tripped in your home all the way through to our response team member arriving at your door within five minutes.

We filmed a few different videos for the site, including the one below which takes you on a quick tour of our 24/7 Kerrisdale Operations Centre… you can view the other clips on the AreYouPayingEnough site…

As stated in the video, we lead regular tours through our Operations Centre and we’d be happy to show you around. The best time to come for a tour is after one of our regular Preventing Burglary seminars. The seminars are held in our Kerrisdale showroom and afterwards we lead a tour through our Operations Centre so that you can see exactly what happens behind the scenes at Provident. The next seminar is on June 22, you can RSVP by clicking here.

If that date doesn’t work for you, please give us a call at 604.664.1087 or just drop by at 2309 West 41st Avenue anytime… we’d be happy to show you around.

Our next ‘Preventing Burglary’ seminar will be held on Thursday, May 27th in our Kerrisdale Showroom…

Come by anytime after 6:30pm for some wine and Benton Brothers cheese … the presentation will start promptly at 7:00pm and will last about an hour. Afterwards, we’ll lead a tour of our 24/7 Operations Centre for anyone who is interested.

This seminar always fills up… and a common comment that we get afterwards from attendees is that the presentation was ‘much more entertaining than I thought’.

A shocking but true fact that we have learned: people assume that a home security seminar will be dry, boring and/or a sales pitch.

Ours is none of those things.

Come by on the 27th and we guarantee that you will leave with some new information that you can put to immediate use to improve the security of your home. Much of what is discussed are tools/tricks that are either free or very inexpensive… you do not need to be a Provident client, or even an alarm owner, to get value from attending.

Home security does not have to be boring.

We hope to see you on the 27th to prove it!

As of today, we’ve got 30 21 15 seats left… please RSVP by clicking here

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…

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).

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.

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.