The 1997 film Titanic was a massive overnight success depicting a tragic whirlwind romance amidst one of the worst engineering disasters in recorded history. Tension mounts in the background as characters make fateful mistakes that will ultimately lead to the deaths of thousands of passengers and crew members. The movie clicked with audiences due in part to a story that many are intimately familiar with – problems and disasters in a well-engineered system caused or intensified by the human element within.
This human element is often the weak point in any system, whether it be a nuclear power station, an oil rig’s safety procedure, or the security you’ve put in place for your business. Operators, technicians, and guards are not only a major expense on your payroll, but they may also be a critical point of failure for mistakes they make while on duty.
Guards especially are a potential source of issues for your security system and your business. The nature of the job makes them the first target of violence, and this places them in a heightened state of stress while working that can lead them to make less than optimal (read: stupid) decisions.
Take the recent stories coming out of San Francisco as an example, where there are so many negative stories coming out featuring security guards that the city has begun looking into revamping laws made in the 1970s to crack down on guard misbehavior. Guards in the city have routinely been threatening teenagers with guns and following kids as young as 12 while throwing out threats and taking photos. It doesn’t help the optics of the situation that most of the kids involved in the suspect altercations were people of color.
Many of the problems involving the use of security guards aren’t their own fault. CCSS has had clients come to them after they were targeted by organized criminal elements that came heavily armed to their businesses, ready and willing to gun down anyone who stood in their way.
Most businesses hire at most one to two guards to keep an eye out on the perimeter of the business, and when they’re armed at all it’s usually just a pistol. What is a single guard armed with a pistol going to do against cars filled with men wielding high-caliber rifles and shotguns?
The answer is: not much. At best, they will run and alert the police, and at worst they’ll go down in a hail of bullets or get kidnapped. Either way, the armed guard will become a major potential lawsuit or liability for the business that hired them. Security guards work best as very effective and well-trained witnesses for police reports and during claims investigations.
So, if armed guards are not the answer to criminals targeting the business, what is? The answer, according to the experts at CCSS, is technology.
Automating Your Security
To counter evolving security threats, you must evolve your methods of detection and reporting. That’s why CCSS has been developing Managed and Optimized Security Services (MOSS) which utilizes advances in automated security technology as a part of its security plans to provide an unprecedented level of touchless security coverage.
These forms of automated security – including camera and sensor systems – have a number of advantages over traditional foot patrol-based surveillance. Cameras and sensors mounted on rooftops and light posts create a much wider field of view and they can employ a variety of cameras that allow for easy identification of threats at night. These cameras can be monitored by third parties whose sole purpose is to observe and report.
That camera feed and instant threat detection can then be passed to the police, who bump up the response rate due to a proven threat being I.D.’d on-premises. The camera feed also provides evidence for insurance claims if the criminals do end up making off with some of your valuable product.
MOSS is more than a software solution, it is a comprehensive security system that also streamlines vendor relationships, improving contract liability, system integration, and pricing so CCSS becomes one point of contact for security needs.
Perhaps the most significant advantage provided by the MOSS system is the cost savings. Utilizing the automated system provides savings of 15-30% ROI for users who switch from contracting out guards for shifts outside of normal working hours.
The best thing you can do for your business’s security is to eliminate as much of the human element as possible. The MOSS model gives you a way to eliminate the most dangerous job on the payroll and let the well-engineered system take care of its own security.
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