Are retail security officers supporting cash in transit guards working in harmony or are they a hindrance? asked our regular contributor Peter Whitehead in our May print issue.
Cash and valuables in transit (CVIT) store visits to fill ATMs, deliver change, and remove cash don’t seem to be decreasing despite credit and debit card ascendancy. reports of CVIT robberies continue. Cash in transit operatives require specialised training and licences, but can retail guards help to increase safety and security before or during CVIT visits? Somebody might have a brilliant idea which is just waiting to be employed throughout the land, but I’m not sure that anybody has produced anything that is helpful yet. Here are some of the attempts at support duties that have been tried before, together with their difficulties.
The CVIT crew calls the shop 15 minutes before they arrive. The store guard attends the arrival area as a visual deterrent. The problem with this reaction is that retail guards do not wear body, head, face or neck armour, nor are they trained in CVIT duties and risks; yet they might be close enough to the CVIT arrival point to be treated as one of the CVIT team. In cases where villains hold down a CVIT crew member to force the vehicle to open, the retail guard could be chosen as the victim. Another problem is that CVIT crews stop at differing store entrances, according to whether they have come to fill an ATM, deliver change or collect cash, and retail guards often get sent to the wrong arrival point. Further, CVIT teams probably treat anyone outside their team as a stranger, regardless of how many times they have seen the same guard. Is this a best possible ‘retail guard support’ reaction?
The CVIT crew calls the shop 15 minutes before they arrive. The store guard goes to scrutinise the arrival area from a distance, looking for people or vehicles which do not fit in, and any person that looks ‘higher risk’. Motor-bikes, scooters and cycle riders can attract interest. Loiterers in vehicles or wearing high-visibility jackets attract security attention because villains have discovered that high-viz clothing seems to make the wearer easily seen, unworthy of notice and thus, indescribable later on. A store guard who is worried about anything calls the shop which calls the CVIT control to ‘radio’ the cash vehicle and order a ‘drive-past’. The problems with this reaction have been crazy. Some shop staff have treated their store guard as so unimportant that they have continually failed to warn of imminent arrivals. Guards have been sent to the rear of stores when the CVIT would be arriving at the shop-front to fill ATMs. The call to store, call to guard, call to shop, call to control, call to CVIT crew can take longer than is safe or secure. One ridiculous situation occurred where a CVIT contractor somehow gave out a help-desk number for a sister company for this contact process, which was kept for use by hundreds of guards around the retailer’s trading areas. Eventually a guard equipped with a store-telephone called direct to give a warning and discovered that he was held in a queue of five callers to talk with the wrong company! Truth is crazier than fiction.
The CVIT crew will call the shop 15 minutes before they arrive. As above, the retail guard checks out the correct arrival area at distance, but in this scenario, if a worrying condition is noted the guard walks to the store’s car-park entrance to send a visual signal to the CVIT crew. Although CVIT crews will not take notice of strangers, this signal can only be sent by good or bad persons, and in either case it would be wise to abort the visit. This technique would be more simple and certain. But before long, robbers would learn about what is happening, and then their first objective could be to neutralise the lone, unprotected, unarmoured retail guard. Not good.
The CVIT crew will call the shop 15 minutes before they arrive. The CCTV licensed store guard ‘patrols’ the arrival area with CCTV equipment and reports direct to the CVIT company if anything ‘wrong’ is noticed. This would be just great if retailers have spent money on extensive camera installations in the store grounds, but in my experience there have been few stores that can boast adequate coverage for a high resolution inspection all round the CVIT arrival areas of a store. If there is a part that cannot be viewed clearly then the system is not adequate for that particular purpose. So at this time I have not heard of a support duty that retail guards can extend to CVIT crews that has high value with safety. It may be that CVIT crews just need to trust in themselves and their equipment in insulated isolation. Obviously the CVIT operative shown above would have no problems …. deadly! I look forward to reading about any ideas that you might send in.
