Shopping centre security: common areas, car parks, incidents

• Centre: malls and walkways, escalators, lifts, public toilets, emergency exits, car park, loading docks, control room.
• Tenant: the shop, its tills, its stockroom, its own cameras and its own guard, if it has one.
• The grey zone: the shopfront and door, a stockroom opening onto a shared corridor. That is where misunderstandings start — write down who does what.

Preventing theft inside a shop is the tenant’s job; see the guide to retail loss prevention. Centre security helps by being present and raising the alarm, but it does not become every shop’s guard.

• Patrols: on every level, with routes and times that change, and checkpoint logging that proves they happened.
• Lighting and sight lines: dead bulbs, dark stairwells and closed-off corners are reported and fixed the same day.
• Stairwells and lifts: enclosed spaces with little visibility — patrol them, not just the driving aisles.
• After closing: check for vehicles and people left behind, and close levels that are not needed.

The balance between a fixed post and patrols depends on size and hours; see static guarding vs mobile patrols. OVIT logs every patrol on the Guardly platform, so the client sees where and when the guard passed.

• Calendar: which days and hours draw the most people, from your own footfall counts and incident log.
• Reinforcement: extra guards at entrances, escalators and the car park at peak hours.
• Flows: shop queues that never block a shared walkway or an emergency exit; tenants are told in advance.
• Events in the centre: each one has its own plan — space, crowd limit, exit, and who stops the event if needed.

Reinforcement is counted in hours: two extra guards for 5 hours every Saturday is 10 hours of cover a week. How many you need overall is covered in how many security guards do I need.

1. Lost child — first minute: whoever takes the report notes a description (age, clothing, where last seen) and tells the control room.
2. Exits: the control room sends guards with the description to every pedestrian and car-park exit.
3. Search: zone by zone, each zone reporting back to the control room; tenants are informed.
4. Reunion: the child is handed over only once the accompanying adult is confirmed; if the child is not found within the short time the procedure sets, the police are called.
5. Medical incident: call the emergency services, move people back, one guard waits at the entrance to guide the ambulance in, record it with times.

The procedure sets who does what, not medical actions. If someone on shift is first-aid trained, that is recorded separately; a guard without such training calls, clears the area and guides.

Every such incident is recorded at the time. See what a security incident report should contain.

• One point of report: every incident, from a water leak to a theft, goes to the control room, which decides who responds.
• Contact list: each shop’s manager, opening hours, and who holds keys out of hours.
• Shared instructions: what a shop does on an alarm, an evacuation or a suspicious object.
• Feedback: the tenant hears what happened in or next to their shop, not through rumour.

At OVIT a real person answers the operations desk, and patrols, incidents and reports appear in one live picture on Guardly. Procedures are written into the post orders before the first shift.

• Where: entrances and exits, tills and cash rooms, stockrooms, plant rooms, car parks (article 19 §2).
• On the customer floor: only by exception, in large stores selling high-value goods, when there is no other way, using wide shots that focus as little as possible on faces (§3).
• Never: in eating and leisure areas, fitting rooms, toilets, or areas where staff work without public access (§4).
• Inside a building: cameras covering common areas indoors or on a building floor must also meet the conditions of article 15 for apartment and office complexes (§1).

The general rules apply too: signs before the camera’s range (article 12), deletion within 15 working days at most if there is no incident (article 8), no permit or notification to the authority, and no monitoring or evaluation of employees (Hellenic DPA). More in CCTV and GDPR for businesses.