The casino hotels on the Las Vegas Strip, with all their glitzy delights, aren’t just palaces of distraction. They’re miniature surveillance states, but now questions are mounting over a very different type of crime than the grifting and grabbing scams Vegas has always been obsessed with — the mass shooting mounted on Oct. 1 from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.
A typical facility might be armed with thousands of cameras, which watch gamblers as they enter, while they play and when they leave. The footage is stored as potential evidence and monitored by internal security forces who are prepared to dispatch a response within moments in case of problems.
It turns out, one place the casino’s cameras don’t have eyes is the network of hallways inside the Mandalay Bay hotel. That’s where gunman Stephen Paddock, 64, of Mesquite, Nev., shot a Mandalay Bay security guard, Jesus Campos, at 9:59 p.m., about six minutes before Paddock started firing at a crowd of thousands of concertgoers gathered below, an attack that killed 58 people and injured nearly 500 others.
Where was hotel security?
The lack of cameras in the hallway has made it difficult to nail down a precise timeline of events, and investigators promised an updated timeline.
Experts on security say the normal protocol for casinos is to call police immediately for help when an armed threat presents itself.
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This Quick Read was submitted by Ryan Berlin, managing editor of Facility Maintenance Decisions, ryan.berlin@tradepressmedia.com. Read more about security within facilities and how physical security meets technological innovation.
