What a professional physical security assessment examines, what you get at the end, and how to tell a real assessment from a checklist sales call.
Here is what that actually looks like, step by step, for a typical Los Angeles office or facility.
A good assessor reviews what you already have before the site visit: floor plans, incident history, insurance claims, existing vendor contracts, and any policies on paper. In California, that now includes your Workplace Violence Prevention Plan. SB 553 requires every employer to identify and correct workplace violence hazards, and a physical assessment is one of the cleanest ways to document that you did. If your WVPP says hazards are "regularly inspected," someone has to actually inspect them.
The assessment starts outside. How does someone reach your building? Where are the sightlines? Is the lighting even, or are there pools of dark between the lot and the door? Are there places where landscaping gives someone concealment within arm's reach of an entrance? In LA we see the same patterns over and over: multi-tenant buildings where nobody owns the lobby, street parking that keeps employees exposed after dark, and rear doors propped open for deliveries or smoke breaks.
Badge readers on paper are not badge readers in practice. We test them. Can you tailgate behind someone with their hands full? Does the stairwell door latch every time? Does the freight elevator bypass the floor restrictions? A reader that fails open, or a door closer that has been defeated with a wedge, shows up in nearly every first assessment we run.
The question is rarely "do you have cameras." It is whether the cameras cover the approaches that matter, whether the retention period matches how quickly you would notice an incident, and whether anyone can actually pull footage at 11pm when they need it. Same with alarms: who gets the call, what do they do, and has that ever been exercised?
Security is mostly people. How are visitors received? Can a stranger reach the bullpen without passing a single person whose job is to notice them? What are your reception staff and guards actually instructed to do, and does that match their post orders? If you have a guard force, we read the post orders and then watch whether the post runs the way the paper says.
The deliverable is a written report, not a sales deck. Findings ranked by risk: fix this week, fix this quarter, plan and budget. Photos of the actual gaps, not stock imagery. And realistic options at different price points, because a $200 door wedge policy sometimes buys you more safety than a $20,000 camera expansion.
Two tells. First, a real assessor spends more time asking questions and walking the site than presenting. Second, the report recommends fixes they do not sell. If every finding points at one vendor's product, you got a quote with a clipboard, not an assessment.
If you want to know where your building stands, book a call with Anna. We run security assessments across Los Angeles and the rest of California. If you would rather start on your own, our guide on how to conduct a security risk assessment walks through the DIY version.
