Armed robbery with injury: A case history and discussion

11/28/2000 

By John D. Moore, CPP

Contents:
The Robbery
The Environment
The Target
What went wrong?
How security plans fall short
In Summary

The Robbery

With only an hour and a half to go before the clothing store closed that Saturday, the 18-year-old employee spent her time folding and rearranging stacks of clothes near the entry to the business. She never saw the young 15-year-old robber enter the business. He approached her from behind, having entered by the open front door.

The young robber displayed a long-bladed filet knife, and yelled at the employee, ordering her to turn around. When she turned, she saw the youth with the knife, who began to scream at her to give him “all of the money.”

The employee at the clothing store had about 10 feet to walk to get to the cash box, but she never stepped toward the cash. In her mind, the screaming of the young robber was irritating her, and she made a conscious decision to refuse the robbers demands. Furthermore, she decided that she was about 6 inches taller than the robber that she outweighed him by 50 pounds. So, she decided to take the knife away from the robber, and “send him on his way.”

In one motion, the employee reached out to grab the knife, and actually succeeded in doing so, by grabbing the long blade of the filet knife. Her motion frightened the robber, who instinctively pulled back on the knife…while the hand of the employee still surrounded the blade. Instantly the employee realized her mistake, and she suffered injuries to three of the fingers on her left hand. The robber turned and ran for the front door, leaving the business empty-handed.

This robbery was not unlike many of the approximately 3,200 robbery cases I studied in Spokane, WA. At the time, I tracked each commercial robbery to determine why each particular target had been selected and to evaluate training, procedures, and security in use at the time of the incident. Site security surveys were completed at these businesses, victims and managers interviewed, and recommendations made to each victim business to try and keep the crime from happening to them again, in the future.

Let’s take a look at this business, and see if there are identifiable risk factors, which led to the robbery and the injury.
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The Environment

This business was located in a commercially zoned area, and only one of many businesses within a very short distance. Many of the other businesses within this commercial zone were light industrial and some were service businesses. All of the other businesses were open Monday through Friday, and all of the other commercial sites had closing hours which occurred between 5 and 6 p.m. in the evening. Only our victim’s business was open on Saturday. Within a 10-block radius of the target business, there had been at least a half dozen other robberies although there had been none in the year preceding the robbery at the clothing store.
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The Target

Although the target business was not the only commercial operation in the neighborhood, it was the only one of the businesses that was a retrofit home. The business owner had purchased the house after zone changes had occurred which allowed the formerly residential property to become a business. So, in the middle of the adjacent businesses, our target was essentially a two-story house being operated as a business.

On most days, the store was operated with only one person in the business, although there were many times the business owners were present to assist the paid staff in the day-to-day business dealings. On almost all Saturdays, one of the owners would have been present along with the employee, but on the Saturday of the robbery, this was not the case.

At the time of my security survey and interviews after the robbery, I determined that there was no security plan in operation. It was pointed out to me at the time of my visits that there had never been a security meeting of the half dozen employees that worked in the clothing store. The business owner felt that there was never a need for one, and that they felt their business was safe, compared to a bank or pharmacy.

No security alarms or other “security hardware devices” were in use at the time of the robbery. In fact, the cash used for normal day-to-day operations was contained in a fishing tackle box. This box was centrally located in the main entry area, so that it could be readily accessible by employees, and at the time of the robbery, our robbery victim was less than 10 feet away from the cash. She advised me that there was about $120.00 in the cash box at the time of the robbery, and that this included the cash she had opened with that morning.
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What went wrong?

After looking at hundreds and hundreds of robberies, there were some things that were different in this case and were readily identifiable. First, there was a physical injury in this robbery. That is not the “norm;” in most robberies there are no physical injuries. One of the most important goals of a security and safety program for employees should always contain discussions and procedures that can help employees reduce their physical danger if a robbery ever takes place.

In this case, there was no robbery security or safety program. Unfortunately this is very common for small businesses. It is also common in some high-risk businesses that are not so small, yet have employees and managers at risk during day-to-day operations.

Are robbery security and safety programs that hard to come by? Why is it that a lot of businesses take no action until after they get robbed? In the case of our robbery at the baby-clothing store, absolutely no action had been taken prior to the robbery, yet after the robbery, local police were invited to help them set up such a program. The cost of that program? Nothing. Could or should that have been done prior to the robbery and injury to the victim? Certainly.
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How security plans fall short

Many of the readers in this forum are well aware of the tendencies of some businesses as they deal with the robbery related security and safety issues confronted by employees all over the world. Some of the largest companies that I visited had acceptable security plans pertaining to robbery matters. That was the good news.

Moore, shown here conducting a training session, says that companies at risk of robbery should regularly offer employees professional robbery security training.

The bad news was that when I interviewed the employees of that same company, they neither knew of such a security plan, or had never been trained or briefed on it. Some businesses trained employees only every couple of years, well after turnover made it virtually impossible that anyone would still be at the store that remembered the last training program. Many businesses also told me that they had regularly scheduled security meetings.

Unfortunately for those businesses, they never documented the training, who taught it, or even who attended those meetings. If you have robbery security and safety training sessions, but you don’t document that same training, it is almost as bad as never having done it all.

In my interviews with our injured victim at the clothing store, she told me that she had worked in retail for a couple of years, at three or four stores. She identified the stores for me and told me that in her working career thus far, she had never had a security meeting of any kind to discuss anything but “once we had a meeting to tell us not to detain shoplifters.”

I asked the victim if she felt that her actions were appropriate on the day of the robbery, and she said, “Of course not. Actually, I was an idiot.” She told me that she just reacted to the fact that the robber was younger and smaller than she was, and that she determined that he was not taking “her money.” I discussed with her the statement she gave as to the ownership of the money, and she agreed that it was not “really [her] money, and that it could have been replaced.” I asked her if it was worth spending most of Saturday afternoon in a local hospital (she had injuries to three fingers, one of which was very serious), just to protect the money, and she told me that she wished that she had given the robber the money and not gotten hurt.

Okay, how often does this happen? How often does an employee feel that the money is “theirs,” and that they “can’t let someone take it” from them? Actually, it happens a lot more than it should, considering the numbers of people who have placed their own safety second and the protection of the money first.

These are the things that must be guided by policy, and employees must receive training in fundamental and sound practices in case a robbery happens. If the young victim had been taught the appropriate things to do by any of her employers, she is quite sure that she would not have done the stupid thing that she did. From a security management and risk reduction approach, employers should not just teach the things that should be done if a robbery occurs. They should also teach the things that should not be done. Further, every training session must be documented in detail, with the trainer signing and dating the training session that they gave.

In evaluating the security of a high-risk business, you should look at the area around the business, well before looking at the target. In a set of circles around a business, there should be at least three areas of concern. The widest circle is the environment around the target, the next being the perimeter, and then ultimately the structure (interior and exterior). Sound principals of Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED) should be utilized through every stage of the security survey.

Evaluating the robbery training methods and the maintenance of that same training is also important. In my evaluations of training methods of what to do when a robbery occurs, we found that the use of video as a robbery training tool rated near the bottom of the training methods we evaluated. Conversely, role-playing and on-site training using role-playing challenges were much more successful methods of teaching for both short and long-term learning.
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In Summary

For security and safety professionals, there is much work to do in the area of businesses at high-risk for robbery. These are important steps:
 

• Evaluating and identifying robbery risk factors and taking steps to mitigate those risks.
   
• Professional robbery security training, given regularly, over time.
   
• Documentation of all security surveys and security training.
   
• Provide for post-robbery trauma support for employee victims.

Although these steps are critical to reducing risk to employees, these steps should be revisited on a regular basis. High-risk businesses may require robbery training as often as every month, although quarterly training may easier to manage and document.

Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) are crucial to the well being of employees who may have become victims of violent crime in the workplace. These programs should be recommended to employee victims, immediately after an event takes place.