Prevention through Analytics: Ensuring Safe and Legal Play on the Floor

Casino floors are high-stakes environments, ripe with potential safety and financial risks—money is continuously changing hands, multiple events are occurring simultaneously, and patrons can become emotional after wins, losses, and consumption of alcohol. Unless surveillance and security departments have their eyes on the right screen at the right moment, cheating and endangerment can go unnoticed. In order to better monitor activities while ensuring safe and legal play, security and surveillance departments need to implement streamlined processes and up-to-date technology.

Traditional Security and Surveillance Methods

The traditional practice of manually recording, tracking, and reporting incidents is cumbersome and inhibits the investigation and reporting process. Information can be inconsistent and not readily retrievable, and media files are frequently not associated with an incident. Compiling meaningful reports using these methods is a lengthy and arduous task, making it difficult for surveillance teams to correlate events, identify areas of risk, and optimize staff allocation.

Today, more surveillance and security personnel are turning to comprehensive software solutions to help streamline internal processes and better deal with casino-specific challenges, such as human behavior, unfair play, and liability risks.

Challenges of Securing the Casino Floor

Highly emotional reactions

Risk and reward are predominant themes within a casino, increasing the likelihood of heated emotional responses. Following a big loss, an angry patron might be more likely to cause harm to facilities, assets, or other patrons. The consumption of alcohol—often in excess—also increases the possibility of disorderly conduct. Behavioral unknowns present a formidable challenge for surveillance and security teams who need to be prepared to handle any situation at any time.

Fortunately, there are tools available to help predict and plan for various outcomes and effectively prevent future incidents from occurring. Fully integrated software featuring built-in data analysis allows surveillance teams to spend less time collecting, managing, and reporting data, and more time gaining insights into trends. Mitigating unknowns enables surveillance and security teams to devise effective strategies for improving the prevention of—and response to—incidents.

Patterns of theft and cheating

Theft and cheating are risks in every game on the casino floor, even slot machines. Patrons may attempt to steal unattended winnings or chips or team up to count cards. By reporting on a patron's wins, losses, and interactions—within the property and with other guests or staff—surveillance personnel can track behavioral trends to determine whether the suspect is playing safely and legally or, in fact, stealing from the casino. But traditional manual reporting can make this a daunting task.

Software that records data and stores associated media files helps surveillance personnel report, quantify, and spot trends more readily. For example, photos of banned or self-excluded patrons enable security guards to identify these individuals at the gate and escort them out before they enter. Likewise, if there is a pattern of patrons attempting to leave from a certain exit without paying, data generated from these reports will help identify the need for increased security in that area.

Regardless of the scenario, data-enabled reporting software can help surveillance and security teams save time, improve fairness, and prevent loss.

Liability and lawsuits

Maintaining complete and accurate incident reports helps reduce the risk of liability and lawsuits. Recording incident details and actions taken to resolve the situation—and prevent recurrence—provides a complete audit trail that can be referenced to mitigate liability should legal action be taken.

Internal theft can create a different type of liability issue. In the event an employee is fired for stealing, maintaining detailed reports of their suspicious behavior can protect your organization against a wrongful termination lawsuit.

Incident reporting systems can also help your gaming operation adhere to Gaming Commission requirements. Having a comprehensive, fully integrated solution in place ensures compliance with industry standards and government regulations.

Solutions for a Safer, More Secure Floor

Although incident reporting and surveillance software solutions may be relatively new, they're essential for effectively predicting, planning, and preventing incidents. Traditional pen-and-paper methods demand too much time and effort from security teams, diminishing their capacity to detect, prevent, and respond to illegal activity.

Data-enabled reporting platforms allow security and surveillance teams to identify trends, make informed decisions, and shift their focus from reaction to prevention.

Prevention Through Analytics

Centralizing data into an easily accessible archive allows surveillance teams to file and search for supporting documents when they need to confirm a patron's past suspicious behavior as criminal. Flexible solutions featuring modular architecture provide end users with the capability to customize the system to meet their specific reporting needs. Automated data analysis enables teams to identify certain high-risk areas, individuals, or situations. Some platforms even offer optional add-on modules, such as facial or license plate recognition capabilities that expand the system's capabilities and increase the security team's ability to intervene before an incident occurs.

Don't Gamble on Security

Traditional methods of reporting and analysis diminish the capacity of surveillance and security teams, potentially impacting the safety of patrons and employees, in addition to casino profits. With data automation, streamlined reporting capabilities, and exploratory analytics, your surveillance and security teams will be better equipped to proactively ensure safe and legal play on the casino floor.