Reducing Museum Losses from Theft
The museum industry faces one of the most daunting security challenges in the world today. In what amounts to every security professional’s worst scenario, museums place some of their most precious possessions out in the open, and then opens their doors to allow the public to view them up close, sometimes even to handle them. Yet this is the charter for museums; not to merely store great works of art and antiquities, but to create collections and allow the world to view, touch and study objects. FocusMicro can provide museums across the nation with the tools and expertise to enhance their security programs and increase their ability to protect and safeguard their collections. FocusMicro Security Consultants can assist a museum’s security organization with developing and enhancing an institution’s security program, including the application of state-of-the-art technology based security solutions.
Keeping our cultural treasures safe from harm has always been a difficult and formidable task, and it appears that it is becoming even more so. Although there are no definitive figures available, there have been estimates that worldwide art theft is currently ranging between 2 and 6 billion dollars per year, depending upon which organization is producing the numbers. The variability and broad range of the estimate has several contributing factors. First is the difficulty in determining just what is defined as ‘art’, followed immediately by the inaccuracies and vagaries in assessing the value of an item. Also at issue is the nature of theft reports themselves: in the United States for instance, most police agencies do not classify a theft of a work of art as such, but simply as property theft.
What is agreed
upon is that the theft and subsequent sale of art and antiquities is a
significant criminal issue, exceeded only in worldwide profitability by the
sales of illegal drugs and weapons. Though the figures are imprecise and
incomplete, there is also a consensus among museum professionals that theft
incidents are increasing in both frequency and valuation.
The world of movies and television depict art thieves as somewhat heroic daredevils, carefully researching the high technology security measures of an institution. The thieves then apply equally high tech countermeasures before lowering themselves from the ceiling in the dead of night, avoiding a maze of laser beams that can only be seen with special goggles.
Museum security professionals know however that most thefts are of the decidedly low tech variety: a visitor hiding behind draperies until the museum is closed; an employee putting an artifact into a briefcase or coat pocket; or a common burglar with limited lock picking skills entering a storage area with no alarm system. These common types of events are foreseeable and preventable, requiring only modest expenditures for FocusMicro access control, intrusion detection and digital surveillance systems combined with highly regimented policies and procedures.
Museum viewing areas, with their constant flow of visitor traffic, are sometimes perceived to have the highest risk and the greatest potential for loss. Yet for most museums, a mere 10% - 20% of their artifacts (or even less) are on display at any given time, while the balance of their collections are in storage. In truth, the storage areas of museums contain the majority of the museums’ collections. And although the more popular and highly valued objects are frequently on permanent display, museums’ storage areas account for the majority of the collections’ valuations as well.
In 21st century museum security strategies, the implementation of technology solutions from companies like FocusMicro has clearly had a positive impact on minimizing theft losses. This application of technology has had an interesting effect on the nature of museum thefts. Those institutions with the lowest levels of protection suffer more thefts from external sources, while those better protected suffer the majority of their thefts from internal sources. The inclusion of technology in a security program is clearly very important, but it is not a catchall solution for mitigating all types of threats.
