Officials with Mac’s Convenience Stores and city police have teamed up to make a plan on how to prevent robberies from happening at stores across Thunder Bay.
Security managers for the convenience store met with Thunder Bay Police Service officers to plan how they can prevent these kinds of robberies from happening Tuesday. The two-day planning sessions, which continued Wednesday, had ideas that vary from potential barriers between store employees and customers to a buzzer system.
Sean Sportun, manager of security and loss prevention for Mac’s, said they are doing everything they can to make sure employees and customers remain safe.
“We had some pretty productive meetings yesterday as well as this morning,” Sportum said Wednesday.
“We’ve taken immediate steps to remove signage from our windows, we’ve looked at where we could put a fence in as well as improved lighting, put in additional cameras or what not.
“We have given a list to our maintenance team back in Toronto and they are actively working on those fixes immediately. I should say they should be installed by early next week depending if we can get the construction vendors out here.”
While some security changes will be immediate, he said bigger plans will still need to take time in order to test to make sure they work but expected everything to be in place sometime in November.
He said he’s going back to Toronto to talk to the store executives and see if any of the strategies suggest would work. Any time that a store is robbed, it’s a concern for the company but the root causes for those crimes are usually social, he said.
“In the past, Thunder Bay has had its challenges with robberies and it seems to be certain times of the year that it peaks and then it falls off,” he said.
“Looking at statistical information provided by Thunder Bay police, in 2010 there were about 170 of which only five per cent were related to Mac’s. I know we are front and centre on this issue. The overall issue of robbery isn’t going to be solved by Mac’s. It’s a social issue.”
Det. Insp. Phil Levesque said the Mac’s staff were receptive of their suggestions and would be considering suggestions Thunder Bay police made.
He said the safety of the public and the clerks were of the highest priority.
“They have to have some barrier or protection to stop these people from advancing in the stores,” Levesque said.
“We can participate in crime prevention and public safety. We’re not the business owners. This is a cooperative effort. We make the suggestions based on experience and professional training. We’ll see how seriously they take them.”
