Family Security Planning

It’s family night, a Monday night tradition that you and your family have carried out for as long as you can remember. It’s a night for spending quality time together and having fun, playing board games and hide-and-seek in the dark. But this Monday evening, just as you’re making your way around the Monopoly board, you hear a loud crash from the other room, footsteps, and then mumbled voices. Realizing criminals have just broken into your home, adrenaline rushes through your body. As you look around at your spouse and kids, their eyes wide with fear, your mind fills with questions on what to do and how to get them to safety.

We all know our families are the most precious asset in our lives. When faced with danger, there’s nothing we wouldn’t do to protect them. However, sometimes life can throw you an unexpected curve ball that you have no idea how to deal with until all is said and done. But it doesn’t always have to be this way. When it comes to dangerous situations such as a home invasion, carjacking, robbery, or attempted abduction, having a family security plan in place can help save the lives of your precious family members, as well as your own.

The Importance of Planning Ahead

Your home is the one place you have some control over when it comes to security and protection. However, when a family member leaves the home, they leave that security and protection behind. This is why having a family security plan for a variety of dangerous situations is crucial—it can be the one and only thing they have to save their lives.

When devising a family security plan, it’s always important to spend time thinking about the public situations each of your family members encounters on a routine basis. Doing so will help you to devise a plan around each situation that will help keep them safe should they ever find themselves in the midst of a potentially deadly crime.

One of the best ways to create your family security plan is to hold a meeting with your family so you can discuss and explore a variety of "what if" scenarios based on the real-life danger that criminals bring upon innocent people each and every day. For example:

• What if someone invades your home when you and your family are inside? What should each member of the family do?
• What if your spouse arrived home after picking the kids up from daycare and found the house ransacked? What action should they take?
• What if your teenager goes shopping at the mall with some friends? What security precautions can he or she practice to ensure their safety?
• If your child walks home from school, what if someone were to pull up in a vehicle and demand your child to get in? What should your child do?

Most people do not have a family security plan in place. Even worse, some families have never even taken the time to discuss potential "what if" scenarios with their loved ones. This is because most people don’t like to think about such scary situations. Instead, they convince themselves that horrible crimes such as home invasion, rape and murder happen to other people—not them. But nothing could be further from the truth. As an expert in the security industry and Founder of Global Security Experts, I can tell you firsthand that criminals don’t discriminate. It doesn’t matter if you’re white, black, poor, wealthy, male, or female— the risk of becoming a victim of a horrible crime is the same to you and your loved ones as it is to everyone else.

This is why having a thorough family security plan in place is so vitally important. Without one, you and your family will be left completely unprepared in the event such a horrid crime should occur. As a result, everyone will be left to their natural "fight or flight" instincts—a reaction that could very well be the wrong response.

The news headlines inform us of these life-taking reactions every day. A man tries to overpower a robber with a knife, only to be stabbed and killed. A child is seen on videotape walking calmly out of a store with a stranger. A woman held at gunpoint in a shopping center parking lot gets into a car with a man only to have her dead body found days later in a desolate location a few miles from where she was abducted.

Naturally, no one wants to entertain the idea of being in such a horrible situation themselves, let alone their spouse or child. But taking time out of your busy life to think about these tragic scenarios and devising a family security plan around them can literally safe your life and the lives of your family.

Implementing a family security plan can drastically improve your chances of surviving the ordeal. To increase the likelihood of survival, be sure to take the following into consideration when devising your plan:

• Include emergency phone numbers in your plan.
• Ensure the plan accounts for each crime scenario that every member of your family could potentially face.
• Put your plan in writing and thoroughly review and discuss it with your entire family to ensure they understand the plan.
• Rehearse the various plans put in place by enacting mock crimes with each family member. Continue to rehearse over and over again.
• When it comes to home crimes, include an escape plan and/or route for each member of your family. Also be sure to provide a copy of your plan to trusted neighbors, making sure to review the plan with them so that they know the vital role they play if such a crime were to occur.

As a final note, although you may have little control over the safety and security of public environments, this is not the case when it comes to your home. Just as having a family security plan in place is important, so is ensuring that your home is equipped with multiple layers of security. By having these layers of security measures in place, you can deter and even prevent criminals from entering your home in the first place.

Fortify your home and train.

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