Parking Lots and Garages: Security Factors

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.)