Macomb’s day-to-day life means people are frequently moving through parking lots, retail strips, apartment entrances, sidewalks, and event-adjacent areas—sometimes late in the evening. When an incident happens in those environments, the defense often argues that the crime was sudden and unpredictable.
Our job is to test that story against the realities a reasonable property operator would have addressed, such as:
- Poor lighting in entrances, stairways, and parking areas
- Access points that are easy to bypass (broken doors, propped entries)
- Lack of functional monitoring (cameras missing, not maintained, or not covering key areas)
- Security staff gaps during peak activity times
- Repeated complaints or prior police calls that should have triggered upgrades
In Macomb, these issues don’t need to be “perfectly identical” to the later incident. The question is whether similar conditions created a foreseeable risk and whether reasonable precautions were ignored.


