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

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.

Our next Preventing Burglary seminar will be held on Thursday, April 8th at 6:45pm in our Kerrisdale Showroom.

Click here for more details and to RSVP.

We’ll have a wine & cheese reception before hand and then start promptly at 7:00pm. Afterwards, we’ll lead a tour through our 24/7 Operations Centre for anyone interested in seeing what happens behind the scenes when an alarm trips.

Our seminars always fill up … RSVP today to ensure that we’ve got a space for you on the 8th.

Here’s a clip from a recent seminar discussing ‘Five-Minute Proofing’ and why it is the most important home security tactic…

Here are a few of the comments that we have received about past seminars…

“The presentation was interesting, flowed, Mike clearly demonstrated expertise…there was a substantial emphasis on basic security.”

“[as a result of attending the seminar] I have a far better understanding of how one protects their home and that really it starts with the homeowners.”

” getting even more confidence in Provident”

“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.”

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.

Our next Preventing Burglary seminar will be held on Thursday, January 21st at 6:45pm in our Kerrisdale Showroom.

Click here for more details and to RSVP.

We’ll have a wine & cheese reception before hand and then start promptly at 7:00pm. Afterwards, we’ll lead a tour through our 24/7 Operations Centre for anyone interested in seeing what happens behind the scenes when an alarm trips.

Our seminars always fill up … RSVP today to ensure that we’ve got a space for you on the 21st.

Here’s a clip from a recent seminar discusses ‘Five-Minute Proofing’ and why it is the most important home security tactic…

Here are a few of the comments that we have received about past seminars…

“The presentation was interesting, flowed, Mike clearly demonstrated expertise…there was a substantial emphasis on basic security.”

“[as a result of attending the seminar] I have a far better understanding of how one protects their home and that really it starts with the homeowners.”

” getting even more confidence in Provident”

“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.”

Our next Preventing Burglary seminar will be held on Thursday, November 26th at 6:45pm in our Kerrisdale Showroom.

Click here for more details and to RSVP.

We’ll have a wine & cheese reception before hand and then start promptly at 7:00pm. Afterwards, we’ll lead a tour through our 24/7 Operations Centre for anyone interested in seeing what happens behind the scenes when an alarm trips.

Our seminars always fill up … RSVP today to ensure that we’ve got a space for you on the 20th.

Here’s a clip from a recent seminar discusses ‘Five-Minute Proofing’ and why it is the most important home security tactic…

Here are a few of the comments that we have received about past seminars…

“The presentation was interesting, flowed, Mike clearly demonstrated expertise…there was a substantial emphasis on basic security.”

“[as a result of attending the seminar] I have a far better understanding of how one protects their home and that really it starts with the homeowners.”

” getting even more confidence in Provident”

“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.”

There was a fair bit of press today about the proposed legislation to regulate the sale of body armour in British Columbia.

The rationale is to give Police an additional charge that they can lay against a gangster wearing a bullet-proof vest, the fashion accessory of choice by most of Vancouver’s gang members it would seem.

I was interviewed by Canadian Security Magazine for a story on the topic… and specifically about the impact of regulation on the private security industry.

In a nutshell, I’m a little skeptical of how successful legislation like this would be in actually deterring criminals from possessing and wearing body armour. I think that we’ve already got more than enough laws in place. What seems to be missing is enough happening once someone has been charged with an offense. If we can’t keep someone in jail long enough after they have been convicted of manslaughter, what are the chances of an ‘illegal use of body armour’ charge being taken seriously?

Insofar as some of the talk in the security industry about mandating that security guards wear body armour, the logic of that escapes me as well. Creating additional rules and regulations, the full costs of which will be passed on to small businesses, seems to be an ineffective strategy if the goal is to impact criminals.

Here’s an excerpt from the magazine article where I’m quoted… (you can read the full article here)

But not everyone agrees with the proposal.

Mike Jagger, founder and president of Vancouver-based security firm Provident Security Corp., says such legislation will probably do little to deter criminals or solve the problem.

“You’re talking about a group of people who make their living importing and distributing illegal drugs and shoot at rival gang members with illegal guns,” he says. “I fail to see how regulating the sale of body armour does anything to impact that other than getting in the way of regular people.”

Creating more laws might look good, but that’s about it, he says. “There are more than enough rules in place right now that they can’t enforce,” Jagger says. “There aren’t enough resources to enforce what already exists, so adding more rules and levels of bureaucracy — I don’t get it.”

It shouldn’t be up to the government to decide who is or is not at risk, he says. It’s obvious that body armour is necessary for some jobs, such as that of armoured car driver or police officer or corrections officer, but often it’s more a matter of how threatened the employee feels.

“It feels to me like legislation created for the purpose of being seen to do something without a lot of thought going into what’s the purpose,” he adds. “I think personal safety is just that — it’s personal, and employees need to be empowered to communicate whether or not they feel safe in a situation and do whatever it takes to be safe. They should never be put at risk, and that’s a combination of having a good company and people being responsible for themselves. If you’re missing one of those things, legislation is not going to have much of an impact.”

Jagger disagrees that body armour should be seen the same way as a helmet or a seatbelt. Treating it as an occupational health and safety issue is just “one of the best of the worst ways” to handle it, he says.

“If it’s really about personal safety, then why not focus on getting that message out to employees to educate them on what they can do to better protect themselves irrespective of who they work for?”

CSIS’s next step is to send the B.C. government a letter outlining the results of the survey.