SafetyRankBlog

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

About This Blog and BranchSafety.com

BranchSafety.com was developed by the team that built The Griffin ™ The Bank Security Suite.  Griffin is a web service that provides bankers and security industry professionals with in-depth analysis including predictive capabilities regarding bank robberies.  Griffin analysis is used for assisting in branch site selection, determining the effectiveness of robbery deterrence equipment and assessing overall risk levels for senior financial institution managers.  Griffin reports are also available to law enforcement personnel and attorneys who are working on premise liability cases.

The team that conducted the research and model development that went into Griffin ™ noticed several very interesting trends around the safety of bank, thrift and credit union branches.  Some of this data will be made available on this site, information will be limited to ensure none of Griffin’s analysis is used by individuals with criminal intent.

Prior to its launch as a web service Griffin ™ was a project of great interest to the management, software developers and analysts at Raptor International.  Based on exploratory work done in South Africa, where Raptor was founded, the development team of Raptor knew that their flagship product, RapAnalyst was capable of developing a highly accurate model to identify a branch’s risk of being robbed.  Using data from 2004 and 2005 Raptor developed a model in June of 2006 that predicted slightly better than 70% of the bank robberies in the US that occurred between January 1^st and June 30^th.  Several variables where added to the model and by September the model was indicating that 80% of the banks that had been robbed year to date met Griffins rating of Elevated Risk or Significant Risk.