Fremont, California has 50 million square feet of flexible industrial space, over two-thirds of it in the Bayside Industrial Zone, home to hundreds of manufacturing and tech companies. Fremont police recorded 461 commercial burglaries across all business premises in 2025 and give unverified alarms a lower-priority response, accepting sound, video, a panic button or an eyewitness account as verification.
By Jacob Ross, Security Specialist · Guardian Integrated Security · CA PPO #121089 · Last updated August 1, 2026
This guide is for whoever is responsible for a production plant, an R&D facility or an industrial yard in Fremont and the wider East Bay. Every local figure below is linked to the City of Fremont or the Fremont Police Department at the point where it is used. Where the published data covers all commercial premises rather than manufacturing specifically, it says so.
Why Fremont’s Industrial Base Changes the Problem
Fremont is not a city with some industry in it. The City’s economic development office reports that over two-thirds of Fremont’s 50 million square feet of flexible industrial space sits in the Bayside Industrial Zone, home to Lam Research, Delta Electronics, Jabil, Synnex and Mentor Graphics, along with newer arrivals such as Pony.ai and Enovix, which the City says built the nation’s first advanced battery manufacturing facility in Fremont. The same district holds Pacific Commons South, a 2.5 million square foot industrial project the City describes as believed to be the largest speculative industrial project ever built in the region, with UPS, Amazon, Facebook, Bloom Energy and Cepheid among its early tenants.
South of Bayside, the Warm Springs district holds Tesla’s Fremont Factory, described by the City as a 5.3 million square foot operation with an approved master plan to expand by another 4.6 million square feet, inside an 850-acre Fremont Innovation District that also counts Zoox, Seagate, Western Digital, ThermoFisher Scientific and FM Industries among hundreds of technology and life sciences employers.
That scale is the security problem. Sites of this size mean long fence lines, multiple gates, loading docks on more than one elevation, yards holding trailers and raw stock, and buildings that are close to empty for a large part of every week. A single roving officer cannot see most of it at once, and a camera nobody is watching only tells you what happened after it did.
What the Local Crime Data Does and Does Not Tell You
The Fremont Police Department’s 2025 Annual Report charts burglary in three separate categories — residential, commercial and auto — and records 461 commercial burglaries in 2025.
Two caveats matter before that number gets used to justify anything. First, the commercial category covers every business premises in the city: shops, offices, restaurants, warehouses and plants alike. The department does not publish a breakdown by premise type, so there is no published manufacturing-only burglary count for Fremont, and the figure above should not be read as one. Second, the department states that its crime statistics come from internal systems, may differ from data reported to external agencies, and that some reports may be reclassified later. The fuller picture, including how the count has moved across recent years, is set out in our Fremont commercial burglary statistics breakdown.
What Fremont Police Tell Businesses to Do
The department publishes its own business crime prevention guidance, and its framing is worth quoting: burglaries, it says, are typically crimes of opportunity. Its advice for non-operational hours is unglamorous and mostly free:
- Lock every possible entrance, windows included, and leave lights on inside and outside the building; automatic motion-sensor lighting can be used to draw attention to intruders.
- Keep shrubs trimmed low so nobody can use them as cover, because lighting, in the department’s words, creates an atmosphere of exposure.
- Secure trailers with locks or block them in. The department notes plainly that unsecured trailers can easily be towed away — directly relevant to any plant with a yard.
- Label valuable items with the company name and address, document serial numbers, and keep an up-to-date inventory log with a copy stored away from the site.
- Use alarms and video surveillance, and register those cameras with the department.
If a break-in does happen, the guidance is to call police and wait, not to go in. Officers ask that nobody enters until the building has been cleared, both because intruders may still be inside and to keep the scene intact for evidence.
Registering Cameras With Fremont Police
Fremont runs a private video surveillance registration program, and the 2025 Annual Report counts nearly 900 systems in the community already registered with the department. Registering tells police that cameras exist at your address and gives them permission to contact you if a crime occurs in or near where those cameras are installed. It takes a short online form, and neighborhoods with at least two registered systems can request surveillance signage that the department pays for.
It is worth being clear about what it is not. The department describes registration as a way for officers to reach you after a crime — a contact record, not a live view of your cameras and not a monitoring service. It shortens the time it takes an investigator to find footage after an incident; it does nothing during one.
Why Verification Decides How Fast Police Respond
This is the part that catches most sites out. Under the Fremont Verified Alarm Response policy, all non-verified alarms reported to the department receive a lower priority response, referred to as a BOL, or be on the lookout. Officers will respond if they happen to be in the area and available, at their discretion.
Verification, in the department’s own words, may come in the form of sound, video, a manually activated panic button, or an eyewitness account indicating a crime is occurring. It can also be established when an alarm company agent, property owner or any witness is at the scene and affirms that police are needed. Any business in Fremont with a monitored or audible alarm is required by city ordinance to hold a permit, currently $40 for a new two-year permit and $20 to renew, with the sticker posted visibly near the main entrance. Permits attach to the location, not the operator, so a plant that moves needs a new one. The ordinance itself, including what happens after repeated false alarms, is covered in detail on our Fremont commercial burglary statistics page.
The practical consequence for a plant is straightforward: a motion sensor tripping at 2am is a BOL. Someone watching the camera who can describe what they are seeing is a verified alarm. That distinction — between an alarm nobody has confirmed and one somebody has — is what determines the priority Fremont police give it.
Covering a Plant After Hours
Four approaches do the work, and most plants of any size end up combining them.
Live video monitoring puts a live agent behind the existing cameras. AI flags on-camera activity in under a second and an agent reviews it, speaks to the intruder through on-site audio, and alerts police with a description of what is actually happening — the verification the city’s policy asks for. Guardian can also dispatch its own patrol units to the site; police are notified, never dispatched by us.
Security patrol services cover the gap between fixed posts, with logged checks across a large footprint at irregular intervals. Security guard services remain the right answer where the job is staffed access control: badging contractors, receiving deliveries, managing shift change, and being physically present at a gate. And a remote surveillance trailer covers ground that has no power or network yet — expansion works, a new yard, a laydown area — without waiting for infrastructure. Warehouse-specific coverage is dealt with separately in our California warehouse security guide.
Live Video Monitoring or On-Site Guards?
Cost is usually what decides it. On-site guard coverage is typically billed at around $25 to $30 per hour, while live video monitoring runs under $3 per hour. The roughly 70 percent saving often cited for remote guarding is derived from that gap between coverage rates — it is not a quote, and it is not a promise about any particular site.
Guards still win where a human has to be physically present and make decisions: gate control, contractor escort, badge issuance, first response to a medical or safety event on the floor. Monitoring wins on perimeter, yard, roof, dock and parking coverage after hours, where the task is seeing everything at once rather than being in one place. Most Fremont plants get the better outcome by using guards where presence is the point and monitoring everywhere else. Guardian prices each site individually — contact us for a quote rather than working from a rate card.
Guardian Integrated Security serves Fremont and the East Bay from its California operations, with 20+ years protecting 2,700+ California businesses, a BBB A+ rating and CA PPO #121089. If you want your own site assessed, request a quote or call 800-400-3167, and you can see the full range of local coverage on our Fremont security services page.
Sources
- Fremont Police Department, 2025 Annual Report — commercial burglary count; registered camera systems.
- Fremont Police Department, Alarm Permit Program and Verified Alarm Response — verification, BOL response, permit rules and fees.
- Fremont Police Department, Business Crime Prevention — commercial burglary prevention guidance.
- Fremont Police Department, Private Video Surveillance Registration — camera registration program.
- City of Fremont Economic Development, Bayside and Warm Springs employment hubs — industrial space, districts and employers.
