Crash! Boom! Grab the clothes!

Feb 1, 1998 12:00 PM, George Partingtom

Retail theft is not always sneaky or subtle. Sometimes, it is violent.

In Atlanta, thieves broke into a Parisian department store four times in six months using the same forceful method - they gained access by ramming a car or truck through glass doors and into the store after hours. Once the vehicle came to rest, they exited, quickly grabbed men's designer clothing and fled, the first time on foot and on successive raids to waiting getaway cars.

Store manager Bob Houck responded to the first two thefts, which happened within four days in August 1997, by placing planters in front of the doors, according to published reports. In December, the burglars responded by stealing a car small enough to maneuver around the planters. When more planters were placed in their way, they stole a truck big enough to "destroy" one of the planters, according to Mario Morales, manager of Phipps Plaza, the mall where Parisian is located.

Just last month - at 12:30 a.m. Jan. 23 - another mall department store fell victim to the same crash-and-grab style crime, this time a Macy's south of Atlanta. Police declared it a copycat crime, although the criminals dispensed with a getaway car and simply backed the stolen truck out of the store after filling the truck bed with Tommy Hilfiger clothes, according to published reports.

The crash-and-grab crime is a relatively new twist on the smash-and-grab crime commonly visited on display windows. But convenience stores are usually the targets, according to Roy Bordes, president of the security consulting and design engineering firm The Bordes Group Inc., Orlando, Fla. "Most of the criminals drive in and drive out in the same car."

Retail outlets favor glass fronts that show off the enticing merchandise inside, but reinforced glass is not a feasible answer, because "every time you reinforce it, somebody gets something bigger," says Bordes.

The only solution short of a brick wall, says Bordes, is the strategic placement of bollards - 4-inch diameter pipes filled with concrete and embedded in concrete. Bordes says bollards can be used with a hydraulic system to raise and lower them depending on the situation. A store could lower them below ground during business hours and raise them when they are closed. Or the bollards could be surrounded by large, decorative planters, ensuring the planters could not be moved out of the way.

An after-hours security patrol is another effective deterrent, says Bordes, and many malls use it. Although Phipps Plaza uses after-hours patrols, the crimes were committed so quickly - in less than two minutes, according to Morales - that guards could not respond in time. For maximum effectiveness, Bordes recommends that the patrol guards carry pagers that are tied into a mall-wide alarm system. When an alarm is tripped, the system can report automatically to the guard via the pager. "A system can report to the roving officers exactly where an alarm is taking place, and they can tell by zone where they are needed," says Bordes. "You can zone a mall to the point that a guard knows exactly what window the perpetrators have gone through."

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© 2012 Penton Media Inc.

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