It used to be that when you wanted to get into your building or apartment, you would have to pull out your ring of numerous keys and flip through them until you find the one that opens the door. Fumbling through the ring for the right key m…
In the old days of video surveillance, a closed-circuit TV system (CCTV) to monitor the doors and parking garage and lot used to be a grainy black-and-white mess. The footage would transmit to some subterranean bunker with a tiny TV so some…
The door intercom system is the old standby of apartments, co-ops and condos — a thin sheet of burnished metal bolted on the side of the building and equipped with buttons that control who enters a building. There have been entire stories…
According to the Washington, DC-based online database, the Gun Violence Archive, a mass shooting is an incident in which four or more individuals are wounded or killed. In 2015 alone, the U.S. faced 372 such incidents, leaving 475 people de…
So far in 2016, as of February 5, exactly 1,187 people have been killed by guns in the United States. Of those deaths, 287 were children under the age of 17. In the first 10 days of the 2016 over 100 people had been shot in the city of Chi…
Q. I’ve been noticing that there is heavy traffic of people that come and go to a particular cooperative apartment near mine in Flushing. I’m assuming that there is alleged gambling going on with card games, basically every day and defini…
Managing risk is one of the most important things you can do to maintain the viability of a business, and what many board members sometimes forget is that their association is just that, a business. Risk management—the process of identifyi…
The days when an apartment building's 'security system' consisted of a tricky front door lock and the landlord's ill-tempered dog are long past. Today, security measures range from old-style deadbolts to high-tech biometric screening e…
Not so long ago, having a security system required drilling through the walls of your cooperative or condominium building and involved installing many spools of wire attached directly to a bulky keypad. Sophisticated and Secur…
Security systems are not just for homeowners in a suburban setting. With advances in wireless technology, security and life safety systems, the features found in the newest systems are a great appliance add-on to condo or co-op apartme…