In Security Solutions for Strip Shopping Centers, author and security expert witness Karim H. Vellani discusses risks and solutions for strip shopping center security:
As an industry best practice, the objectives of crime analysis are:
1. To reduce crime on the property.
2. To evaluate and aid in the selection of security measures.
3. To justify security expenditures.
4. To provide a system of monitoring the effectiveness of security measures.
5. To provide a continual evaluation system of the site’s crime situation.
6. To reduce liability.
Having outlined the objectives of crime analysis, we should take a look what crime analysis is and is not. Crime analysis is not demographic data that determines risk for an area using unknown data points and some far reaching social disorder theory, nor is it data from other unrecognized sources. To the contrary, crime analysis is based on actual crime data pulled from law enforcement databases. The difficult part here is accessing those databases from each and every police department where a store is located. Despite the difficulty in some jurisdictions, it can be done.