Mall owners look for European anti-terrorism help

Nov 11, 2003 12:00 PM

Just before Christmas in 1983, a car bomb detonated outside London's Harrod's department store. Within minutes, trained department store personnel led shoppers out of the store, urging them to evacuate the area in case a second bomb was planted nearby. Police officers, appearing from nowhere, kept everyone moving. In Europe, terrorism has been a way-of-life for years. But U.S. shoppers -- and mall owners -- have been slow to prepare. Ever since Sept. 11, mall operators have been preparing for the unthinkable: a shopping center bombing.

So what are mall owners doing to reduce threats and make shoppers feel secure? They are retraining guards, installing closed-circuit television equipment, running evacuation drills, installing shock-resistant glass and redirecting traffic flow, among other measures.

Many are looking abroad and taking notes from the hard-learned lessons of other countries, especially Israel and Britain. So far, they've resisted the scariest and most overt measures that might frighten shoppers away, such as metal detectors, arbitrary searches and physiological profiling -- but perhaps not for long.

"Sept. 11 was a terrible wake-up call, especially in the U.S.," says David Levenberg, vice president of loss prevention and security at General Growth Properties Inc., which operates some 200 U.S. malls. "We've taken a number of measures to try and deter any act that might take place."

This article was excerpted from "Lessons Learned: U.S. mall owners look abroad for anti-terrorist measures," which appeared in the October edition of AC&SS sister magazine Retail Traffic. To read the complete article, follow this link: retailtrafficmag.com/ar/retail_lessons_learned/index.htm

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