Defenders Deserve a Microphone: Why LVT Created Defender of the Year

The Origin Story

When security works, nothing happens. No break-in. No stolen car. No empty branch lobby with a broken ATM. Nobody writes a memo about the incident that never occurred, and that's the problem with the job. The better you are at it, the less anyone notices.

We see this every day at LVT (LiveView Technologies). The people who run security, safety, and facilities programs are rarely in the room when anyone hands out credit. They're on the phone at 2 AM. They're walking through a vacant site before sunrise. They're the reason a new hire feels comfortable walking to her car after a closing shift, and she'll probably never know their name.

We built Defender of the Year because those people are real innovators. Our customers are the ones who took a mobile security unit, dropped it into a stubborn problem, and figured out how to make a place safer. Many of them did it with a tight budget, a skeptical leadership team, and a community depending on the result.

Their daily defense of employees, customers, and neighbors deserves a microphone. So we built one.

The Journey of a Story

Here's what happens after you hit submit.

We’ve seen submissions from loading docks, parking lots, bank branches, construction sites, and more every one is a firsthand account of someone deciding that "this is just how it is" wasn't good enough.

Those accounts land harder than any metric we track. A statistic tells us a unit did its job. A story tells us who stopped dreading a shift, who stopped finding graffiti on the door, and who stopped getting the call in the middle of the night. That's why we read every one.

Finalists then get an all-expense-paid trip to LVT's Safety and Security Summit at Snowbird Resort, Utah, where we honor them in front of the industry. 

You also don't need a brand-new story. We accept success stories up to three years old.

Profiles in Defense

This year, four customers in four different industries took home the award. Here are their stories.

EG America: A Voice on Every Lot

EG America runs more than 1,400 convenience and fuel locations across 30 states. That many parking lots gives trouble plenty of places to start. People loitered on the lots and used them for illegal activity, and the team members working those shifts felt it first. "Not only does it make our team members feel less safe, but it impacts sales," said Joshua Nylander, Manager of Investigations for EG America.

Cameras alone weren't the answer. The difference came from a response in real time. When someone loiters on an EG America lot now, they hear, "This is a no-loitering area. Leave the area now." Nylander put it this way: "For the criminal that comes to your store, they're getting instant feedback that they are not where they're supposed to be." Without that, he said, the alternative was continued loitering, continued loss, and poor employee retention.

WaFd Bank: A Safe Place to Start the Day

A bank has to open clean, safe, and on time, every day. WaFd's branches were running into something harder to fix than a single crime. "There would be somebody sleeping in our doorways, tents put up in the parking lot, graffiti, drug usage," said Rochelle Herteg, Division Sales and Service Manager at WaFd Bank. "When you have that reputation of being a bad area, people don't want to visit your branch."

That reputation fell on branch staff first. Once LVT^® Units went in, the change came fast. Jim Hall, AVP Corporate Facilities, said that by the end of the first week the activity they'd been seeing had dropped 100%. For Herteg, the difference was personal: "Now that we have LVT, I can start my day knowing that I'm in a safe space." Staff stopped calling in sick, and the middle-of-the-night emergency calls stopped.

Schnucks: Taking Back the Parking Lot

Matt Redmond, Director of Security at Schnucks, doesn't sugarcoat where things stood at some of the grocer's St. Louis-area stores. "Cars were being stolen, cars were getting broken into, violent crime and crimes against persons," he said. "To be honest with you, it was a little out of control."

Redmond's team adapted by putting visible, always-on coverage right where the trouble was. "We really want to provide the most secure location for them to come and work, and for our customers to shop," he said. Since the units went in, he says, they have seen a downturn in events.

Brookfield Properties: Stopping the Problem Before It Starts

Vacant buildings attract the kind of trouble that's easy to underestimate. One incident at a Brookfield logistics property cost close to $200,000 in damage and left the building offline for 14 months.

Nicole Ivers, Global Head of Health and Safety, refused to treat that as the cost of doing business. Her team wanted a deterrent that works before anything happens. "A criminal coming up on a building like this and seeing the LVT Units out in front, the lights come on, they immediately know that there is somebody watching," she said. "They know that they're going to be detected." Brookfield now runs 57 units across 42 locations, and the people who work at and around those sites are safer for it.

Four industries. One thing in common. Each team looked at a problem others had accepted as a cost of doing business and decided to stop reacting and start deterring.

The Window Closes October 31

Don't wait for the story to feel big enough. We're not looking for the biggest deployment. We're looking for the clearest proof that visibility, deterrence, and fast response changed what happened on someone's property and changed how the people there feel when they show up.

Give your defender the recognition they've earned. Submit your story.