Are Dye Packs Worth It?

The core tenet we at Raptor International had when we developed Griffin-BR™ for bank robbery risk assessment and mitigation web-services was simple: to help bank managers optimize the ROI on their security spend.

As part of a major study we are doing for a client we are beginning to seriously question the economic return dye packs, especially in terms of return on investment.  We know that they are a long held value by the bank and retail security communities.  However, while our study is in the early stages, we are having a difficult time finding a measurable ROI on the use of dye packs.

Let’s look at a subset of the data for Northern Georgia (see *Reference below). There were 117 bank robberies with a total of $1,585,319 stolen in this area during the 12 month period ending March of 2007.  Dye packs were dispensed in 20 of those robberies, three of which led to the recovery of cash.  So, of the total of $232,062 recovered from the all117 robberies, the cumulative amount recovered through the use of the dye packs came to only $5,762.  That doesn’t even cover the average cost maintaining a dye-pack at a branch. That begs the question, are dye packs worth it?

		Bank Robberies	% of Total	Incidents Where Case Was Recovered	% of Category	Total Amount of Cash Recovered
Dye Pack Not Given Out		97	83%	7	7%	$226,300
Dye Pack Given Out		20	17%	3	15%	$5,762
	Totals	117		10		$232,062

Because of the demographics of the Northern Georgia area we used for the above data it is a good representative for the rest of the country excluding Los Angeles and New York City.  (LA and NYC’s size and density make it non-meaningful to extrapolate national trends.)

With our clients permission we will bring you more excerpts of this research.

More source data and a map is located at http://www.branchsafety.com/Georgia_Extract_Report.pdf

*Reference: Bartow, Bibb, Chatham, Clarke, Clayton, Cobb, Colquitt, Columbia, Coweta, Dekalb, Dougherty, Douglas, Fayette, Fulton, Gwinnett, Hall, Henry, Jackson, Lincoln, Lowndes, Muscogee, Polk, Richmond, Rockdale, Talbot, Towns, Walker and Walton Counties

Comments

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[Karan]

Depends if you base your ROI on money recovered or criminals apprehended. The Insurance companies may be more concerned with criminals apprehension, in such a case if Dye packs lead to more convictions then ROI needs to take into consideration the insurance offset (easily calculated) and societal benefit of increased prosecution (more difficult). It might beat not using dye packs then.

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I suspect that a lot of bank robberies which would otherwise be committed simply don't occur because the would-be robbers fear being given a dye pack.

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