In 2005, a gunman walked into the Tacoma Mall and shot seven people. One of the survivors sued the mall after finding there’d been six prior shootings and three other gun incidents on the property.
Washington’s state Supreme Court ruled against him.
That case is the clearest illustration of what foreseeable harm means here. It shows why so many Washington negligent security cases peter out before a jury even sees them. Property owners are not required to guarantee your safety. They’re tasked only with guarding against danger they should have seen coming. Washington courts define “should have seen coming” more narrowly than many people expect.
If someone hurt you on property that felt unsafe even before anything happened, a Seattle negligent security lawyer starts from there when exploring a case.
Here’s how Washington decides whether harm was foreseeable and what it takes to clear that bar.
Nobody Has to Make You Safe
To clear away some of the confusion, let’s start with what the law doesn’t require.
A property owner is not automatically an insurer of your safety. Bad things that happen on someone’s property doesn’t make them liable. The fact that better security might have stopped it isn’t the test either. Hindsight is only hindsight.
Washington property owners carry a much narrower duty of care. Businesses owe their invitees (customers, tenants, guests, anyone on the property by invitation) reasonable protection against third-party criminal acts that were foreseeable. That word “foreseeable” is the key in a premises liability case in Washington State.
If the harm wasn’t foreseeable, then no duty of care existed. If there’s no duty of care, the case ends at summary judgment before anyone hears what happened to you.
Therefore, the fight isn’t really about whether the property was dangerous. It’s about what the owner knew, or should have known, before you set foot there.
The Prior Similar Incidents Test
History is the first route to foreseeability. Washington courts want to know whether similar crimes happened on the premises before. Those incidents should be close enough in time and character that the owner had noticed those dangerous conditions and still did nothing.
This brings us back to Tacoma and that 2005 shooting.
In McKown v. Simon Property Group, the court examined nine prior gun-related incidents at that mall and decided none of them counted. The incidents differed in nature, scale, and location from an indiscriminate mass shooting, and several were too remote in time.
That means nine prior incidents were not similar enough.
One should read that as a warning about how the “foreseeability” test works, not as a reason to give up. The word “similar” holds the key. For example, a string of armed robberies in a parking garage helps build a case about the next armed robbery in that garage. It would build a weaker case about something categorically different.
You want a pattern that matches. Some indications of a matching pattern could include:
- Police calls for service
- Incident reports
- Tenant complaints
- Prior lawsuits
Any evidence that this specific kind of harm, in this specific place, had already happened and the owner decided to do nothing.
When the Business Itself Is the Warning
A history of prior incidents isn’t the only path to a legitimate lawsuit.
Washington also recognizes that the nature of a business can make crime foreseeable on its own. Some operations carry inherent risk that any competent owner should understand from day one. No prior incident log would be required.
Let’s consider what that could cover:
- A bar closing at 2 a.m. with a poorly lit parking lot
- A cash-heavy business staying open overnight
- A parking structure with unmonitored stairwells
- An apartment complex with broken exterior gates and a keyless main door
All of these are examples of the kind of situations an owner should address before anyone else gets hurt. A landlord who has never had a violent crime on their property can still be held liable if the property’s condition made such an incident predictable.
In all these example settings, the owner should have known.
Proving They Knew and Did Nothing Anyway
Foreseeability gets you a duty of care. Proving negligence in violent crimes means showing what the property owner did about it.
The evidence in an inadequate security lawsuit in Seattle usually comes from the property’s own paperwork. Maintenance records could show that a gate was reported broken months earlier or work orders never filled. There could be revealing emails between management and ownership about cutting the security contract or tenant complaints with dates on them.
Consider also what the industry expected. Security consultants and criminologists can testify about what a reasonable owner in that neighborhood, running that kind of business, would have installed.
They can point to lighting standards, camera placement, access control, and security patrol frequency. Such testimony converts “they should have done more” into a measurable standard that somebody failed.
Here, timing is also very important. Surveillance footage can get overwritten in days. Meanwhile, incident reports have a way of slipping through the cracks once a lawyer gets involved.
Boland Law Takes These Cases Apart
A negligent security claim is not really about the person who hurt you. It’s about the company that should have expected such an incident but then decided the lighting, the gate, or the guard wasn’t worth the cost.
The Law Offices of Justin R. Boland handle third-party criminal acts liability cases across Washington.
Our practice has even won a $10 million negligent security recovery. We know which records to demand and how quickly. After all, foreseeability evidence tends to show up in documents that don’t stay available for long.
If you were attacked somewhere that never should have felt unsafe, speak with an attorney with experience on such cases.
Someone saw it coming.
Our job is helping you prove it.
