Welcome to my blog, all about how the "eye in the sky" does its thing. Sponsored by Zoom Benefits. They really offer some great discounts, Click here to learn more.
I had a great question submitted by a reader recently. He was interested in knowing what the percentage is of time spent by surveillance Observers watching the public, versus watching employees.
Well things are quite different than they were back in the good old days of the 80s and 90s. Today almost every point-of-sale terminal or cashier station has a camera over it and a link to a computer interface that shows exactly what the cashier has one up on the register, or what ticket they have just scanned and are about to pay.
We didn't have those things in the good old days, in fact you were lucky to get a detail tape if you wanted to look at what the cashier had been doing. So now we have all those tools, so it's really easy to go through an audit a cashier, especially if they're over or short, and have a history of doing so.
As far as the customers go, you can't get away with as much as you could back in the old days. Back when slot machines accepted coins, we had the problem of slugs. A slug is a lead or lead alloy coin that weighs approximately the same as a $1 coin. We had to spend a lot of time looking for those and if the Slugger was a real artist, he was virtually impossible to catch. Usually you would just have to look for the kind of person who had that look about him, head on a swivel, constantly looking around, maybe you look like a druggie or some kind of a scumbag.
I caught a few of them like that, back in the day, but most of the time you would get notified by the slot Department that have certain amount of slugs have been found in the hopper of a machine and then you'd have to go back and do a review, on video tape, to see who the last player was and then track them back to see if you could get either an ID shot. Then you had to wait for that person to come in again, and notice them, then you can have security approach them after they've been playing on a machine for a while and that was really the only way you could catch him.
Today of course, none of the slot machines take coins, it's all cash in and took it out. The bill acceptors have gotten extremely sophisticated in the last 15 years, to the point where you can't even think of having them accept a counterfeit bill. And with all the built-in safety features of today's new currency, you can't really pass one to a human being either, although occasionally a bartender will take one.
Surveillance still spends a lot of time looking at the table games, of course. Very few people take shots anymore but it does happen occasionally. Usually you're on the lookout for a card counter, but you have to be pretty reckless as a counter to get caught. You will see a player very his Bat from one hand at $25 to three hands at table max. That will get the attention of the Pit Boss, Casino shift manager, in anyone awake and surveillance all pretty quickly.
So, this is been a long about way of answering the question, but I think that today's surveillance Observer probably spends anywhere between 60 to 80% of his time watching employees, and the rest of the time watching customers. This can vary of course depending on the property in the clientele, but there's just so much more of an opportunity for the employees to rip the casino off now that you have to spend that much time watching them.
If anyone else has any questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments below or email me. Thanks for reading everybody see you next time, and good luck.
Comments
Post a Comment