In this week’s Las Vegas Business Press, I look a little more closely at what the two-incident “epidemic” of strong-arm casino chip robberies means”
Strong-arm robberies aren’t exactly rare in the United States. According to Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics, there were almost 409,000 robberies in 2009, the last year for which data is available. Often, these robberies don’t even make the local news. Yet when a robbery involves a Las Vegas casino and its gambling chips, it has been national news.
This is mainly because casinos have an aura of invulnerability around them: many assume that because surveillance cameras are so ubiquitous around casinos, committing a crime is impossible there.
Committing the crime isn’t always the hard part. Getting away with it might be
via Las Vegas Business Press :: David G. Schwartz : Casinos’ open layouts invite all, even thieves.
It’s definitely an interesting idea to think about…just how safe are casinos? A honest polling of the incident reports generated in Strip casinos would probably say, “Not as safe as you think,” and in some ways it’s encouraging that these kind of strong-arm robberies are so rare.
In the end, there’s really no way to defend against this kind of thing, short of metal detectors and perimeter checkpoints. The best prevention is a good deterrent, which is linked to a high clearance rate for these sorts of things, which suggests that casino security and Metro have been doing their jobs pretty well.