Foreseeability: Security-related verdicts climb
In Colorado Real Estate Journal’s October 2026 Property Management Quarterly, Jason Tuohy writes about why security-related premises-liability verdicts keep getting larger. A crime on the property, he argues, rarely decides the case by itself. Foreseeability does: whether the owner knew or should have known about the risk, and whether the response was reasonable.
The piece is written for property managers. Incident records only help when someone reads the trends inside them — opportunistic theft falling while interpersonal incidents rise, for example — and then changes lighting, coverage, or monitoring. A review that gets acted on is a record of reasonable care. A known problem left alone can become the evidence used against the property.
He closes with a practical first step: a foreseeability review. Look at incident trends, not just totals, compare them with similar properties, and ask the question a jury or an insurer will ask later. Not whether something happened, but whether you could have seen it coming.
Opens the October 2026 Colorado Real Estate Journal e-magazine to this article. The full piece is published by CREJ.