Whether your business has a parking lot or your business is pay-to-park, customers have expectations. Parking lots and garages provide criminals with many opportunities, including vehicle or property theft and vandalism. Parking lot crime can reflect poorly on your business. After all, who wants to frequent a restaurant where parked cars are a common target?
If your guests don’t feel safe walking to their car, they may not come back. Therefore, if your business has or is a parking lot, it’s important to prevent car theft and other security issues. That’s why businesses should seek the help of a parking lot company to secure their assets.
One case study showed the higher risk of property or car theft in parking lots stemmed from:
- Inadequate fencing
- Poor lighting
- The absence of attendants
To mitigate the risk for your customers, many businesses seek the expert counsel and technology tools that a parking lot security company can provide. Preventing car theft is just one benefit. Let’s look at some of the ways these security firms can mitigate your risk.
How Can Parking Lot Security Companies Help Your Business?
Some of the most common responses to secure a parking lot include a mix of technology solutions and human effort. This can include:
Using the latest in video surveillance tools helps automate your “eye in the sky.” Old CCTV cameras are out-of-date and out of focus compare to today’s HD digital cameras and other associated tools that allow you to work smarter. Some of the latest in video surveillance upgrades include:
Can Parking Lot Design and Management Prevent Car Theft?
Parking lot security is a problem for many business owners, whether they operate a college campus, healthcare facility, a large commercial building, or a small business. On the one hand, the convenience of off-street parking adds to a company’s appeal. On the other, securing these lots is hard. Each type of parking lot has its own set of issues. Here are some examples:
- Long-term parking lots are a great target for thieves. Many of these facilities, found often at airports, may not have enough security to go around. Theft of items from inside the car are a common target. Vehicle theft and vandalism or even stolen parts can be real problems for the patrons of these facilities.
- Park and ride commuter lots are a great way to save money on a commute while decreasing your carbon footprint. The problem is that these lots have particularly high theft rates. Many times, attendants are only there at the beginning and end of the day. This opens the door to criminal activity while patrons are at work.
- Commercial parking lots, also called pay-to-park locations, rarely seem to have onsite security teams or enough security cameras to go around. They offer a great service but may have poor lighting and several blind spots where cameras may miss important details about activities happening on the lot. Some lots have overgrown shrubbery that becomes go-to hiding places for criminals.
- If you watch movies, it seems like parking garages are dark, dangerous places where lots of crime happens. Parking Today says, “Parking garages have had an undeserved bad name as locations for crime.” However, without the proper design and security systems in place, parking garages could easily live up to their Hollywood reputation.
Can the designs of these facilities help prevent car theft or other types of behavior? Of course. The Urban Institute says:
“The place a car is parked has a lot to do with the risk of car crime. In fact, vandalism to cars, thefts of car parts/accessories, and thefts of personal items are not typically premeditated acts. Rather, these crimes tend to occur because a car was parked in an unsecured location with a large number of other cars, in places where perpetrators go unnoticed or can easily escape.”
