Dye packs?
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Catch-22. Because of the high rate of robberies, insurance is either sky-high, or unavailable. Also, in order to cover theft losses or expensive insurance, prices have to be higher than a similar store in a “nice neighborhood”, leading customers to feel that they’re being gouged.
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Growing up, our neighbors had a low power electrified fencing around a large garden, to discourage deer. They knew my brother and I (age 8 and 10?) played on their property, and warned us to be careful of it. We discovered it was unpleasant to touch, but not really damaging, and we would try to sneak up on it to see if we could touch it. I think we were playing bank robbers, but it would have been out of character for us to take someone else’s vegetables. I think if any adults were aware, they’d have been horrified by our experiments with electricity. They were very kind neighbors, with a large acreage of woods behind their house that they made a point of saying we, and other neighbor kids, were welcome to play in.
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I’m not sure how much liability you could incur just because something might have happened; but that sounds like architecture where a visit from humorless fire-code enforcement could result.
There’s a relatively close analog (the “Man Trap”) that’s commercially available(probably not a bad term to go googling with if you want to see if you can find any cases of litigation around capture-and-hold designs); you see it in datacenter security a lot; or corporate setups with sufficiently low traffic flow that the significant hassle and reduction in effective flow rate can be justified.
Potentially because of the liability questions such systems are always real clear that the inner door will not open until the outer door is closed and locked (to prevent shoulder surfing or small group rushes); but they are often less forthcoming about whether the outer door will remain usable by the people inside the trap, should they wish to back out; and such systems are normally implied to be something that you only operate when you have security staff physically present(generally behind glass, so anyone who passes the low-security verification to enter the outer door isn’t in a position to get at them; but where someone is 30 seconds away from calling emergency services or taking manual action.
I’ve never been in the market for one; and have only passed through them when I had some IT widget that needed poking yesterday which encourages one to be polite and friendly toward security about the authorization you do have; rather than do a little pen testing; so I’ve never had a chance to verify whether the outer door will try to stop you from getting out or whether it’s just an interlock to prevent the inner door from being opened while someone could still pass through the outer door.
I also suspect that(not as a matter of law, but purely informally); the cops and the DA take a harsher view of DIY hold traps than they do of ‘professional’ security vendor installs of $60,000 access control systems for respectable corpo facilities. Doesn’t mean that I’d want to beat the rap if someone burns alive in my ‘secure vestibule’ because I cut costs on weekend security; but to the degree there’s any wiggle room in interpretation of the law or whether or not you drown in code inspectors for the next decade; Jim Bob’s paranoid cabin of horrors is going to be on the harshest possible side of all that; while IT Intersystems LLC. is going to get the white collar treatment.
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I’d be curious about how much of the legality of electrified fencing comes down to its agricultural utility(my layman’s understanding is that, especially if angry or panicked, large animals will treat wire fencing more as a suggestion, even barbed wire; and the amount of fence you’d require to be a hard security boundary would be uneconomic); how much comes down to its intended non-lethality; and how much comes down to it being overt(at least until the climbing vegetation or long grass gets to it) rather than being intended as a covert trap surprise.
Would hidden traps of the same magnitude as electrified fencing be OK; or is trying to take people by surprise(even in places where legitimate users wouldn’t be) legally worse than “the fence before you; seriously don’t touch it; it will touch you back” scenarios? Is the whole enterprise something that would be a pretty much impossible sell if there weren’t an agricultural use case to piggyback on?
I think that a strategy to make trespassers going away it’s playing at high volume a sub genre of rap musics, that normally has music video filled wit scantly clad girls. The problem is that in some case this strategy will attire other trespasser.
That’s still letting them leave unimpeded- I’m not talking about things like dye packs and security cameras, which just increase the chance of finding them later, or alarms, which might hasten their departure, but about the legality/morality of actually catching them in the act and preventing them from getting away. None of this is relevant to my situation personally, I’m just wondering what would happen and whether things would play out in favor of the robber or the (almost) robbed. On the one hand, if they did a break and enter, it’s pretty obvious they weren’t supposed to be there and it seems morally justified to catch the criminal and hand them over to the police. But what if the robber hurts themself trying to escape? Is that their fault or the fault of the person who trapped them? What if the robbed person unexpectedly dies of a heart attack and the robber is never let out? Is the possibility of that happening enough to make the entire idea morally indefensible? How can the person who trapped the robber prove that they intended to humanely capture them and hand them over to the authorities rather than do nefarious things to them? Would calling the police within a reasonable amount of time absolve them of any suspicion? If so, what amount of time is reasonable?
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Alas, the imprisonment itself is illegal. What ever might or might not happen after that is only adding on to the original issue. Although in many places you can kill the person with fewer consequences-often just claiming that you thought they would hurt you is enough to clear any suspicion.
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Sooo, only legal “if the homeowner is present?”
Wow.
ETA: I’m surprised it’s legal at ALL.
Especially in today’s world of “conservative values”
But I suspect that is just slowness on the part of the legal system…and the idea that “first responders” might get hurt.
I can tell you from experience that they are in casinos as well, especially where the money counting rooms are. (along with the cash cages.) Only one door can be open at a time, there’s almost certainly things like badge readers at every door in the trap, and depending on how fancy it is, your badge might get you into the outer door and, say, the cash cage where you work, but not the vault or counting rooms.
There’s also the concept of ‘fail open’ and fail secure- in the event of a power loss, a ‘fail open’ (or fail safe) door will automatically unlock, but a fail secure door will stay locked.
I’ve not seen any data centers that use that style of man trap, though- it’s almost always just card access, or Multifactor access (card and pin, card and hand scan, all three, etc.) But then, My datacenter experience is limited to the ones at the company I work for, and the various telcomm sites I was tasked with visiting back in 2000-2001 when I worked for [ISP]. Possibly clean rooms, if only to limit the ingress of dirt and stuff? :: shrugs ::
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That would be the tort of false imprisonment, which could also be a crime, depending on circumstances. But they could definitely sue you for false imprisonment.
The general principle here in all of this is that you are allowed to use reasonable force in defense of property and in defense of self. And deadly force is never reasonable, legally, when it’s only property that’s being defended. Ever. Above, someone mentioned you can if the property is occupied. That’s not really true. What you can do is use potentially deadly force in defense of self or other people, but only if you reasonably fear for your own safety. And in most states, in the event that someone unlawfully enters your home, there’s a presumption that it is reasonable to fear for your own safety, even if the person is unarmed and isn’t threatening you. You’re just allowed to assume they are. But it’s not the property you are defending in that case. It’s yourself.
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Medical clean rooms are controlled access (limited to people trained in controlled environment protocol), usually badge-in and badge-out. They are fail-safe because the higher-level controlled environments are closed-air, and the worst case for fail-safe is a batch having to be scrapped vs people dying.
In the new movie, Red One where Santa is a buff dude, they better show a lot of gunshot scars…
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That leads me to a new question, then: forget the whole room trap thing, what if someone broke in and you pointed a gun at them? Would you be able to keep them detained under the threat of lethal force until police came? Or are they legally free to leave, since them leaving isn’t a threat to your life?
They are free to leave and you can’t shoot them as they do so.
Ok, so again, in most states, if someone breaks into your home, you can, legally, presume that they present a potentially deadly threat to you, and you can respond with deadly force. I don’t like that that’s the law in most states, but that’s the law in most states. Now, if you don’t shoot them, and you are just trying to prevent them from leaving, you are attempting to make a citizen’s arrest. The situations in which you are allowed to do that vary from state to state, but the person needs to have committed a felony in order to make a citizen’s arrest legal. Now, could you actually use deadly force if they refuse to comply and instead try to leave? Probably not. This is why I don’t like the so-called castle doctrine. In this situation, legally, as the home owner, you’d be better off just shooting first and asking questions later.
ETA: I want to make a couple of things 100% clear. 1. I am not a lawyer. I have graduated law school and am studying for the bar right now, but I am not a lawyer. 2. Absolutely nothing I have written in this thread is legal advice. Please consult an actual lawyer if this is anything other than a hypothetical academic exercise for you.
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I appreciate your expertise even if you’re not a professional yet. And it is just hypothetical- even if someone were to break in, I don’t own a gun. I’m just curious.
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