Illustrative site model, drawn in your browser. Not a client property.
3P Security Group is an independent physical security consultancy, based in Dallas-Fort Worth and working nationwide. We survey what you already own, measure it against the way the property is actually used, and hand you a written report with the findings in priority order and a cost band against each one. We do not sell officers or equipment, so nothing on that list pays us.
The cheapest incident is the one that never starts. Most of the first pass is CPTED, the unglamorous work of making a place read as watched and owned: lighting levels, sightlines, landscaping that has grown into a hiding place, signage, key control, where the fence actually ends. Most of it costs attention rather than money, and almost nobody has walked the property at the hour it is genuinely exposed.
Three gaps on this lot. All of them inherited, none of them chosen.
A protection system runs on one clock. Detection has to happen early enough that whatever delays an intruder afterward outlasts the time it takes anyone to arrive. A camera that only records sits on the wrong side of that clock, and so does a schedule written to fit an invoice instead of the hours the property is open to the street. The first pass is almost always what you already own, pointed somewhere better.
Same six lenses. Re-aimed, not replaced.
What survives the incident decides what it costs you. The asset kept whole, and a record somebody can put in front of an underwriter, an adjuster or a court: the time, the location, what happened, who confirmed it, and where the footage is held. A camera nobody watched is not detection. It is a record of your loss that somebody opens the next day.
An event, a time, a location, and a person who wrote it down.
In protection design a camera has a narrow job. Something else detects, and the camera tells a human what they are looking at so the response fits what is actually happening. Very few commercial properties use it that way. The recorder runs, nobody is on the feed, and the footage gets opened the next morning to establish what already finished. That is not detection and it is not assessment. It is evidence collection, and it starts working after the loss is over.
A body on a post has the opposite problem. Presence is real, but unless somebody wrote down what they saw and when, the site cannot prove any of it later. The thing that settles a claim or a dispute is neither of those on its own. It is a confirmed account of an event, made by a person, at the time it happened.
The alarm trade wrote a standard for this. ANSI/TMA-AVS-01, revised in 2024, scores an alarm before anybody is dispatched, running from Level 0, no call for service, up to Level 4, a confirmed threat to life. The International Association of Chiefs of Police has ratified a resolution supporting it, and monitoring centers have begun certifying to it.
Departments increasingly want to know what an alarm actually is before they commit a unit to it. The standard gives them a way to ask that question, and it gives a property a reason to be able to answer.
Dallas already puts a price on the difference. The city requires an alarm permit, and the Chief of Police may refuse police response to a location without a valid one. After three false alarms in a twelve-month period, the fees begin: $50 for the fourth through sixth, $75 for the seventh and eighth, and $100 for each one after that.
Every nuisance alarm your system throws is billable to you, and enough of them cost you the response as well. The city wrote the business case for verification before anybody in the trade had to sell it. Dallas is not the worst of them either: see what a false alarm costs in seven DFW cities.
Prevent, Protect, Preserve is not three words picked for the letters. It is the protection cycle the field already works to, grouped the way an owner experiences it. Every survey walks the same functions in the same order, and every finding is filed under one of them.
Make the place read as lit, watched and owned, so it loses the argument before anybody tries it. This is CPTED: natural surveillance, natural access control, territorial reinforcement, and maintenance. On the ground that means lighting levels and how evenly they fall, sightlines and the hiding places nobody pruned, the fence line, the gate that never latches, signage, and who holds which key.
Know it is happening, slow it down, and get somebody there. The three are only worth anything timed against each other, and the test is whether detection lands early enough that the delay left afterward outlasts the response. Sensor and camera placement, alarm handling, the call list, locks and barriers, post orders and the shape of the staffed hours all get judged against that one number.
Keep the asset whole, and keep the account of what happened to it. Incident documentation and daily activity reports somebody will actually read, footage retained and handled so it is still usable months later, reporting an adjuster or a court will accept, and the after action that stops the second one.
Deter, detect, delay, respond and recover is the standard protection model. The three words on the door are ours, and they exist so an owner can hold the whole thing in their head at once.
Independent, written and vendor neutral. You own the deliverable and you can execute it with anybody, including the firm you already use. Each one has its own page below.
A guard schedule tends to get set once, by somebody who has since left, against a threat picture that has since changed. After that the hours renew because the invoice renews, and nobody re-opens the question.
There is nothing clever about the exercise and it is usually the cheapest item on the whole list. Lay the hours you are buying over the hours you are genuinely exposed, and move the coverage instead of adding to it.
A walk of the property against the way it is actually used, at the hours it is actually exposed. Assets, threats, vulnerabilities and what a loss would actually cost you, scored so the list comes back with an order instead of only a length. Written against CPTED and the deter, detect, delay, respond model, so any vendor can read it without translation.
Written instructions an officer can follow on their first night without guessing. Tour route and check order, what to do when something is wrong, the escalation path and the call list, and what has to end up in the daily activity report. General orders, post orders and site specific orders, kept short enough that they actually get read.
Whether the hours you are buying line up with the hours you are exposed. Most schedules are inherited rather than designed, and the gap usually sits at the hour nobody is looking, which on most commercial lots is 3am.
What to ask a guard or alarm company before you sign, and how to read three quotes formatted three different ways. We write the scope so the bids answer the same questions, then compare them line against line. We are not bidding on the work, so there is nothing to steer you toward.
Your permit status, the fee tier you are currently sitting in, and what in the call list, the contract and the panel programming keeps producing alarms you are paying for. Paper and policy only. We do not install, service or monitor anything.
What you receive. A written report, yours to keep and yours to shop.
In Texas the paperwork is part of the defense. Whether a property owner owed any duty to protect somebody from a third party's crime turns on foreseeability, and the courts weigh that on five factors set out in Timberwalk Apartments, Partners, Inc. v. Cain: how close the earlier crimes were, how recently they happened, how often, how similar they were, and how much publicity they drew. Every one of those is a records question before it is a security question.
An owner who can produce dated surveys, an incident log and a written record of what they did in response is in a different conversation from an owner who can produce a folder of invoices. That is general information about how the standard works, not legal advice. Your counsel gets the last word on it.
Independence is the product. A consultancy that also sells guards has a reason to find a guard problem, and one that also sells hardware has a reason to find a hardware problem. We take no referral fee, no commission and no manufacturer margin on anything we put in a report. If that ever changes you will be told plainly and in writing before an engagement starts, rather than finding it out afterward.
Guard services, alarm installation and monitoring are licensed activities in Texas under Chapter 1702 of the Occupations Code. We are not offering them, quoting them, or taking inquiries about them until the license is issued. When it is, the number goes in the footer of every page on this site, because that is what the statute requires.
Licensed officers on site, working to written post orders. Requires a Texas DPS Class B security services contractor license.
Design and installation of video, intrusion detection and access control. Separately licensed under the same chapter.
A person confirming what is actually happening before anybody is dispatched, with the clip and the written record attached, scored the way AVS-01 scores it.
A drone launched on an alarm, over the spot itself, looking straight down at whatever tripped the sensor. A camera on a pole only ever covers the angle it was bolted to. This is the aerial version of the assessment job argued for further up this page, done from the one position that sees the whole lot, and it puts eyes on the problem without walking a person up on it.
No. The Texas Department of Public Safety deregulated Security Consulting Companies effective 1 September 2019, so the advisory work described on this site requires no state license. Guard services, alarm systems installation and alarm monitoring are a separate matter. Those remain licensed under Chapter 1702 of the Texas Occupations Code, and we do not offer, quote or accept inquiries for that work until our Class B license is issued.
Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. It is the principle that the physical layout of a place changes how likely somebody is to try something there. Four ideas do most of the work: natural surveillance, natural access control, territorial reinforcement, and maintenance. On the ground that means lighting, sightlines, landscaping, fencing, signage and upkeep, and it is usually the cheapest part of any recommendation.
Three in a rolling twelve-month period. The fourth through sixth cost $50 each, the seventh and eighth cost $75, and every one after that costs $100. Separately, the Chief of Police may refuse police response altogether to an alarm site that holds no valid alarm permit.
No, and that is the point of an independent consultancy. We take no referral fee, no commission and no manufacturer margin. The written report is the product, it belongs to you, and you can execute it with any firm, including the one you already have under contract.
A guard company sells hours. A consultant gives an opinion about which hours are actually needed, and has no reason to arrive at a larger number. Most owners talk to the guard company first, which is how a schedule ends up sized to a contract rather than to a risk.
It depends on the size of the property and how many hours the survey has to cover. The fee is fixed and written into the scope of work before any work starts, so there are no hourly surprises. The first conversation costs nothing.
With your written consent, yes. Chapter 423 of the Texas Government Code makes it an offense to capture images of private property with intent to conduct surveillance, and the Fifth Circuit upheld that statute in National Press Photographers Association v. McCraw, so it is enforceable in full. Consent from the property owner is one of the statutory lawful-use exceptions, and that is what makes aerial work over your own site lawful. It also means the lawful picture stops at your property line. Aerial work is not offered yet.
Yes. On-site surveys run out of Dallas-Fort Worth and we travel for them. Everything that does not require standing on the property runs remotely, anywhere in the country: post orders and procedure, coverage and staffing analysis, bid comparison, policy review, and second-reading an assessment somebody else wrote. Security consulting is not a licensed activity in Texas, but a few states do regulate parts of the advisory work, and where that applies we confirm the requirement before quoting rather than after.
Tell us the property type, the hours that worry you, and what is in place today. If we look at it and there is nothing worth fixing, we will say so, and you will not get an invoice for hearing it.
On-site surveys across Dallas-Fort Worth and Texas. Policy, procedure and bid review run remotely, anywhere in the country.