Recently, there were many cases of crimes being committed inside gated communities. With compound walls and security guards, we always thought, gated communities are safe. Are we missing something for our apartment security?
Living in a gated community provides a lot of mental peace for urban dwellers who go to their jobs leaving their loved ones at home. For professionals who take up jobs involving certain amounts of travel or for households with working couples, apartment living has come as a great boon, as along with security, it brings along a lot of conveniences too.
An important question to ask ourselves, however, is: Is just having security guards at the gate of the compound enough to keep my apartment complex safe? The recent increase in the number of occurrence of crime inside gated apartment complexes, do suggest otherwise. Most of these crimes go unreported in media, as no one wants the vulnerabilities of their home to be discussed in public.
What are we missing out?
- While I am at office or travelling, I am always wondering about who is coming to my apartment while I am away.
- If there is any emergency at home, there is no easy way to reach the security guards and/or neighbors for help. Intercom is not reliable at all.
- Every time my guests come, they have to stand in a queue to enter their details in a register. Wish I could help them avoid that experience, and make them feel more welcome.
- Every other morning, my cook, maid is late. I have to call the security, wait for quite some till I get through, and then wait as the security guard checks the register for attendance. Hope there was an easier way.
- The security guards keep changing so often. I don’t know if they are following the security processes in place. With multiple registers and processes, the security system is anyways a mess.
- I lay down security related processes, but I have no way to monitor it, unless I personally go and sit with the security at the gate. With my personal, professional plus society management commitments, that is hard to accomplish.
- If someone colludes with the security guard and enters the complex at untoward hours, I have no way to know that
- Most of my maintenance cost goes towards paying security guards. I have no way to optimise the number of guards as I have no data on visitor trends
- I call the residents to verify visitors and before I send them in. Many residents do not have a functioning intercom, or they do not pick up intercom on time. I do not have any means to notify residents about visitors in such a case.
- I am here to help, but residents mostly are not able to reach me, in the case of any emergency.
- It is a pain maintaining all those registers. Anyways all that data is never used, as it’s almost impossible to dig out data from those registers.
- Whenever I see new faces walking in, I stop them and ask whether they are a visitor or resident. In some cases they just say I am a resident, says a flat number and walks in. I have no way to verify his/her genuineness.
- My morning goes in answering the intercom, with questions on whether resident’s cook, maid, driver, etc. has come instead of being vigilant at my job.
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