When the Ryder van blew up just after noon on Feb. 26, 1993, it rocked the World Trade Center, killing six people, wounding more than a thousand and leaving a hole more than 100 feet wide in the ground. Though we now know it mainly as a failed first attempt at destroying the World Trade Center buildings, the incident remains the worst event involving a parking garage to occur in the United States.
That event caused a significant rethinking of how buildings manage their parking, particularly what kind of vehicles are allowed to enter underground parking facilities. Coupled with the massive truck bomb that blew up the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City in 1995, it's little wonder that high-profile buildings now have stringent rules about who can park near them.
Also see a photo gallery of good and bad parking lot security design features
Thankfully, parking bombs are rare. If you type variations on "worst parking garage disasters" into search engines, you'll get photos of embarrassingly bad parking jobs or a video of a driver gunning the engine instead of hitting the brake and accidentally playing monster truck.
This unsafe parking elevator lobby has poor visibility
Instead, parking plagues CSOs in smaller ways, and close to a thousand times every day. That's how many muggings, car break-ins and other crimes occur in parking facilities across the United States every 24 hours. Parking security incidents rarely involve deaths, instead having a kind of drip effect that can wear down corporate security officers. (Photo credit: Bruce Ramm, Security Design Concepts, Inc.)
Customers who have incidents, or hear about them, look askance at where they are shopping. Employees wonder about their employers. It's CSOs' job to respond. Their most effective tools? "Visibility and surveillance are the two greatest deterrents to crime," says Paul Dubois, executive director of Tomasi-Dubois and Associates, a parking security adviser in Los Gatos, Calif.
E-Trade found this out firsthand when a rash of "car clouts"—thieves smashing car windows and taking things like stereos and loose items—occurred at complexes where it had offices in Alpharetta, Ga., and Sacramento.
"We had nobody physically attacked and no incidents of robberies," recalls Bob Luca, E-Trade's head of physical security from 1999 to mid-2007. "Just car clouts. But people were very upset about that. Employees want to feel safe when they go to work." Luca, now a candidate for sheriff in California's El Dorado County, says that E-Trade organized a multifaceted response. He was able to get local law enforcement to come take reports on the incidents, which Luca says can be difficult in larger jurisdictions and would be even harder to arrange now, given economic conditions.