If you’ve been targeted by criminals on a commercial property, there are several things you need to know about negligent security & crime in Louisiana. Business owners can be held liable for attacks that occur on their grounds if they did not take reasonable steps to prevent them.
What’s Considered Reasonable?
What’s considered a reasonable step to take to prevent an assault varies depending on the specific environment and the general crime rate in the area. Even in relatively safe areas, business owners must take steps to protect visitors from criminal acts that could occur on their premises, such as making sure that there is adequate lighting in parking lots and stairwells.
In crime-prone areas, the steps considered reasonable to secure an area might be different. It may be unreasonable not to have live security personnel patrolling an area that has seen many assaults, for example.
The overall rate of assault in Louisiana is 436 per 100,000 residents, but some areas are safer or more dangerous than others. We can help you gather evidence of the crime rate in the surrounding area via police reports and other businesses’ internal incident reports to support your negligent security case.
Proving Negligence
Four general proofs of negligence must be made for your case to be actionable. They are:
- Duty of care. All business owners owe lawful visitors to their properties a duty of care.
- Breach of duty. Business owners breach their duty when they fail to take reasonable steps to secure their properties.
- Causation. A business owner’s breach of duty must have led directly to an assault for a negligent security claim to be actionable.
- Damages. The assault must have caused compensable damages.
We can help you gather evidence that proves all four of these elements of a negligence claim.
Take Action Quickly
The statute of limitations, known in the Pelican State as the prescriptive period, is two years from the date of the incident for negligent security claims. However, you shouldn’t wait until the time is almost up to file your claim.
We may have an easier time gathering evidence in the days and weeks immediately following the incident, as businesses often write over security videos and only keep incident logs for a certain period of time following the event.
Contacting a Louisiana negligent security attorney as soon as possible after the incident occurs is always in your interest. In addition to making it easier to gather evidence, the event should be clearer in your mind right after it happened, and your lawyer can also help you avoid common mistakes that could negatively impact your case.
Hire a Negligent Security Lawyer
If you’ve been assaulted on a commercial property, you can hire a negligent security lawyer to help you prove that the business was liable for the attack. The team here at Ron Austin Law has handled countless negligent security cases since we opened our practice in 1995.
We have what it takes to leverage negligent security laws to get our clients the results they need. You can contact us to schedule a consultation with a Louisiana negligent security attorney today.
