CLIENT'S CHALLENGE

Among the many services Matador plans, manages and executes for clients is establishing a security presence – overt, covert, or both – for large client estates or affluent micro-communities. Typically, the benefits of these services are measured in prevention and the discouragement of crime simply due to the deterrent benefit of security patrols. Every once in while, however, the presence of security personnel proves critically important.

This scenario illustrates such circumstances. On a cold night in an affluent, urban California neighborhood, a contract security guard engaged by Matador noted that a motion sensor had been triggered on a client’s unfenced and ungated residential property. As the retired law enforcement officer approached the area, he observed a suspicious individual loitering near the front door of one of the homes in the area. Upon further examination, the officer noted that the man’s clothes were bloody and that he was shoeless, with one foot bare and the other in a sock.

MATADOR’S SOLUTION

The security guard subdued the individual, placed him under citizen’s arrest and waited until the police arrived to take the man into custody. At the police station, the individual described getting into a fight with a group of other men and having to flee to escape. He proved to be a felon with a track record of committing violent crimes. He was held overnight and charged the next day with trespassing.

IMPACT ON THE CLIENT

Even most basic of security measures can save a life. In this particular case, the other residences in the neighborhood were protected by fences and gated entrances. Based on this fact, it’s not too difficult to assume that the man’s presence on the client’s property – driven by desperation and fear of further harm on the part of the assailants – was directly related to it’s relative accessibility. It’s also likely that, given the cold weather and the man’s lack of appropriate clothing and shoes, it might only have been a matter of minutes before he broke into the client’s house itself.

Thankfully, the motion detection system worked – and the security guard intervened before the consequences could have been catastrophic. Because of the Matador guard's responsiveness, the homeowners did not experience a home invasion that night.