When you are attacked on commercial property, everyone points you toward one legal process: the criminal case against the person who hurt you. There is a second case, the one nobody assigns you a caseworker for, and for most crime victims it is the one that determines whether life gets rebuilt: a civil claim against the property owner whose security failures made the attack possible. I just published a free plain-English guide to it, Safir Guide No. 23, Attacked on Someone Else’s Property, alongside the largest expansion of the negligent security section since it launched. Here are three things from the guide.
Three things from the guide
1. The claim does not need your attacker to be caught
The case is brought against the property owner, not the attacker, and it turns on foreseeability: did prior robberies, assaults, and shootings at or near the property put the owner on notice, and did the owner respond with reasonable security? That history is proven with documents, police calls-for-service, the property’s own incident reports, shelved security assessments, so it does not depend on your memory of the worst night of your life. And because commercial properties carry liability insurance, a judgment against the owner is collectible in a way a judgment against the attacker almost never is.
2. The evidence race starts the night of the attack
Surveillance systems record over themselves, usually within days or weeks. The broken gate gets fixed, the lighting gets replaced, the guard schedule gets rewritten. Every day that passes, the scene drifts toward the owner’s version of events. A preservation letter sent early, demanding the video, the incident reports, and the staffing records be kept, is often the difference between a strong case and an argument.
3. The apartment presumption is a hurdle, not a wall
A 2023 Florida law gives multifamily owners who provided a statutory checklist of security measures a presumption against liability. Two limits keep that from ending most cases: the presumption is rebuttable, and the complexes with the worst crime histories are rarely the ones that met the checklist. And it covers only multifamily residential property. Hotels, bars, garages, gas stations, and stores get no presumption at all.
The negligent security section grew too
The guide arrives with seven new pages covering the cases these clusters produce: sexual assault on commercial property, hotel human trafficking claims, wrongful death after an attack, security company negligence, and how your attacker’s criminal case and your civil case work side by side, plus dedicated pages for Hillsborough County and Tampa.
Get the whole guide, free
The full guide covers foreseeability, the evidence race, the apartment presumption, the security company as a second defendant, what these cases are worth pursuing, and the deadlines crime victims are never told about. It is free, and one email unlocks the entire Safir Guides library: get the guide here. The deep version is my book, Hurt on Someone Else’s Property, with a full chapter on negligent security, free to Tampa Bay residents.
And if the attack was recent, skip the reading and get in touch, because the video is recording over itself right now. Every case is different, and no outcome is ever promised. You’re better Safir than sorry.
