Introduction

Across several major cities, a big-box chain was being hit nearly nightly by overnight retail thieves who would pull in behind stores near loading bays and use industrial cutting tools to carve a hole in a store’s back door — escaping minutes later with up to $20,000 worth of merchandise. Gangs were in and out too fast for intrusion detection and alarms to matter, delivery requirements made fencing off the areas impossible, and video surveillance was ineffective as thieves easily concealed their identities with hoods and masks.

It needed to find an affordable and flexible solution, one that could be deployed to specific locations to disrupt criminal activity when and where hotspots were starting to emerge.

Opportunity

The financial toll was mounting, as were indirect losses, from the loss of employee hours to managing restoration and filing police reports to staff resigning or calling in sick due to safety concerns. The retailer knew that preventing burglaries would mean a sizeable financial gain — but it needed to find an affordable and flexible solution, one that could be deployed to specific locations to disrupt criminal activity when and where hotspots were starting to emerge.

Solution / Approach

The retail giant turned to its security services firm (a member of the International Security Ligue). The firm used its extensive partnerships with off-duty police to arrange burglary suppression details in a variety of configurations during overnight hours.

• Decisions about when and where to place officers were informed by the firm’s crime trend analysis and occasionally through intelligence from store managers and reports of seeing suspicious individuals that suggested a particular location was being watched by a burglary ring.
• Once the security firm identified an at-risk location, it tapped into its large personnel resources, arranged the burglary prevention details, and managed all administrative issues surrounding deployment.
• About every other day, the security firm positioned off-duty officers for burglary protection details outside select at-risk stores, usually as a visible deterrence in marked patrol cars but occasionally covertly. On one occasion, they caught three burglars in the act and apprehended them—and it became obvious that news of the apprehensions spread.

Results / Benefits

The results were dramatic. After the security firm’s intervention, overnight burglaries — which had been occurring every 2 or 3nights — dropped to zero. Investing heavily in fortifying locations or hiring extra staff was an option, but they realized it would only serve to harden previous trouble spots. By utilizing their contract security firm’s personnel resources on a temporary, emergency basis, they’ve realized a cost-effective approach that permits them to nimbly respond to spikes in crime.

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