Trucking Risk Tip of the Day: Locked Up Tight?

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In light of Freightwatch International’s recent release of the cargo theft data for 2015, I thought that it was important to highlight a few of those statistics this week and focus on cargo security this week.

In 2015, FWI observed that thefts from a facility were the highest that they have been since they started monitoring cargo theft losses and trends back in 2006.

According to Freightwatch, 4% of all of the reported cargo thefts in the US occurred when someone actually broke into a facility to commit the cargo crime. 4% is hard to quantify, so better to think of it as about 3 per month. Remember, this is just what is actually reported!

Frequency of facility theft is important, but the real issue is the severity of these losses. In the same report, FWI advised that the average value of a facility theft in 2015 was around $681,000 on average! That is about a 322% more than an average full truckload theft!

Additionally, around 37% of these facility thefts occurred on Saturday or Sunday. If you throw Friday into the mix, the number raises to 56% of the recorded facility thefts.

So, this tells us that we need to be more vigilant in protecting our facilities and especially on the weekends!

Let’s face it, updating and auditing your physical security protocol is about as sexy as clipping your fingernails. But, these striking statistics show that this is both a real and worsening problem.

In addition to these tips, consider these as well:

Partner with local law enforcement officers to gain their protection buy in. Perhaps host a monthly donuts and dialogue (I know that the name sucks) meeting and invite any of the officers from the local precinct who would like to attend.

Audit your alarm company by triggering your system. See how long it takes them to respond as well as how effective your communications tree is.

In case you don’t have a communications tree, develop one and test it occasionally. This is a phone list of contacts that the alarm company uses to notify you if your alarm is sounding. In addition to having more than one person listed, that one person who is contacted should be responsible for either traveling to the facility themselves or contacting (and actually speaking) to someone else to have them go do it. If the person who was contacted passes the responsibility on to someone else, it is that person’s responsibility to make sure that they actually go! You don’t want any of the “they called me and I couldn’t do it, so I called Tim. Tim said he would go and I trusted that he would. What if Tim was contacted at 2:00am and he thought that it was just a dream? You don’t want to explain that to your customers!

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