Not all commercial premises are created equal when it comes to their attraction to criminals.
In fact, there are four types of premises which are particularly highly-targeted. These are retail, holiday parks, industrial parks and schools.
Retail and holiday parks may be obvious but it may be rather less obvious that industrial parks and schools often contain a lot of equipment which can be highly desirable to thieves, especially now that schools place so much emphasis on IT.
Having said that, if your business operates outside of these sectors, you should still take security very seriously. In simple terms, if you couple robust security with a business which has little attraction to thieves then you stand a very good chance of them leaving you in peace. If, however, you get complacent and ignore security, then you may find that criminals target you anyway because your business is offering them easy pickings.
With that in mind, here are some lessons you can learn from the commercial premises with the highest crime rates.
You need to control the access to your premises
You get the highest degree of security by maintaining an effective boundary at a distance from your commercial premises and controlling who comes in and out of it in the form of some sort of automatic gates or security fencing. Of course, in some cases there are limited options for doing this in which case you need to be really strict about delineating public and private areas and keeping people out of the latter. Even retailers generally keep most of their stock in private areas rather than on the publicly-accessible shop floor.
Automation can help small businesses implement robust security
Traditionally, one of the reasons why small businesses struggle to implement robust security was because security was very much a manual process and as such required a human to be present any time security checks were required.
Humans are still very important for effective security but now they can be assisted by automated security tools, which can be monitored remotely.
For example, instead of having to leave a member of staff standing at a gate to check people in and out (or keeping people waiting while the member of staff arrived), automated car park barriers can now be monitored and controlled from a central point, so that security staff can get on with other tasks and only attend to the gate when they are actually needed.
CCTV is only as good as the available light
Unless you are going to invest in proper night-vision cameras (which come at a premium price) then you need to make sure that your cameras have plenty of light at all times, especially out of hours.
Usually the easiest and most economical way to achieve this is to use motion-sensitive lights. If you have issues with cabling, either because there is no power source or for health-and-safety reasons, then consider battery-operated and/or solar-powered lights (a combination of both can be the best option).
Speaking of health and safety, motion-sensitive lights can also be a useful way to ensure that there is lighting for people who may genuinely need to access your commercial premises out-of-hours, however unlikely that may seem.
Photo by Daniel von Appen on Unsplash
