Sometimes it can be difficult to measure how well a security system is working. “You can’t measure crimes that aren’t committed,” says Steve Reed, security director at Arden Fair Mall in Sacramento, Calif.
Like many utility companies around the country, City Utilities in Springfield, Mo., was the victim of copper theft. To protect the substations, security cameras were a must. However, providing the lighting for the cameras posed a problem.
Copper theft has become a major crime in the United States, thanks to record prices for the metal and hard economic times. As a New York Timesarticle put it, the current conditions have “spurred a resurgence in the past several months in the theft of common items that in better economic times might be overlooked — among them, catalytic converters from automobiles and copper wiring that is being stripped out of overhead power lines, tornado warning sirens, coal mines and foreclosed homes, where thieves sometimes tear down walls to get to copper pipes and wiring.”
Matt Marcon of MGM Communications in Glendale, Ariz., found that his customers needed a better intercom system. Marcon is a dealer who sells and installs communication systems for self-storage facilities, and he says the old-fashioned intercom systems – press a button and hope someone was there to respond – were hurting, not helping, his customers’ businesses.
The University of Arizona, like major research universities across the country, found that many of its grants and contracts were tied to higher levels of access security. Access to buildings with old-fashioned keys and locks or cards with magnetic strips swiped into pin pads didn’t provide the amount of security the University was looking for. So the school made the switch to smart cards.