Security issue: Raid

Security camera footage of a raid

Raid is the crime of taking or attempting to take something of value from a commercial venue by force or threat of force or by putting the victim in fear. For the crime of forceful theft from individuals, see robbery, for the crime of burglary by forcing entrance by use of ramming with vehicles, see Ram raid.

Description

Although the number of robberies from commercial establishments is only about 21% of all robberies, the impact of those robberies is high, affecting primarily personnel, but also clients and bystanders and they can excess to very violent forms. The act of raiding knows several forms:

• Straight: Demanding money immediately upon entering a store.
• Customer: Demanding money some time after entering a store and engaging in the act of making a purchase.
• Merchandise robbery: A less common type is which involves the forcible taking of goods from a store.

Contributing circumstances

Known circumstances to influence the likelihood or impact of raid, are presented in the table below:

Contributing Circumstance	Influence	Description
Presence of shops	increases number of potential targets	As shops are prime targets for raids, and any shop can potentially become a victim of raid, the presence of shops is an important circumstance that contributes to the existence of this security issue.
Presence of particularly vulnerable shops	increases vulnerability of targets	The vulnerability of a shop - and the attraction this has for raiders - is associated with the shop being open late having no surveillance from the shop to the street or vice versa being situated on the street (not in a mall) selling non-food being situated close to a main road being relatively large,
High levels of raiding in the wider neighbourhood	Increases likelihood of targeting.	The distance to known places where offenders live matters. Study shows that raiders prefer areas in or near their neigbourhoods. This means that if the crime is situated nearby, the criminals are most likely situated nearby also and the likelihood of them selecting the new location for working area increases.
High levels of unemployment	Increases likelihood of targeting	Although there is no real scientific consensus with respect to the causal relationship between the socio-economic background and property crime, high levels of unemployment are commonly correlated with higher levels of property crime.

Impacts

Social impact

• psychological

Economic impact

Raids lead to considerable costs in both a direct (primary) and a indirect (secondary) way. Direct costs of raids come in the form of:

• Preventive costs in anticipation of raids (e.g. security measures, insurance);
• Material and immaterial costs as a consequence of raids (e.g. physical damage, repairs, medical costs, mental harm); and
• Responsive costs to raids (e.g. the costs of detection and prevention, persecution, support trial, etc.).

In addition, the secondary economic impact of criminal offences has to be considered. Violent crime not only leads to financial or physical damage and prevention costs, but also indirectly influences the local/regional and national economy of a country. According to Detotto and Otranto ,“crime acts like a tax on the entire economy: it discourages domestic and foreign direct investments. On a more local and regional level, economists define economic impact on business, property value, tourism and quality of life (social capital).

Safety impact

Convenience store employees suffer from high rates of workplace homicide, second only to taxicab drivers. Customers can also suffer injury from offender assaults. Injuries can result from an employee’s active resistance or from the offender ’s misreading the employee’s nervousness or hesitation as resistance.15 When faced with an employee who chooses to actively resist and is in a face-to-face confrontation, robbers may resort to injuring the worker to avoid apprehension. Higher injury rates are consistently found to be correlated with measures employees take during the robbery.

Measures

• Surveillance
• Reaction force
• Target hardening
• Access control
• Reducing attractiveness (no money in register)
• Increasing chance of apprehension

Enthorf and Spengler(2002) find that planning-intense offences like breaking and entering, robbery (raids) and violence respond relatively slow to changes in the socio-economic conditions compared to other types of crime like drug and alcohol abuse and violent crime. According to the authors, this may reflect that in a first response to unfortunate social and economic developments some of the affected might become attracted to alcohol and drug abuse, which in a later phase has to be financed with criminal activities by committing property crimes like breaking and entering.