While 7-Eleven has given up on doing business in downtown Prince George and has closed two of its convenience stores due to problems associated with vagrants whose shoplifting, drug-using habits and aggressive behaviour threatened the security of staff and customers, one local businessman believes he’s found a formula for fighting crime that works for his store properties in the VLA.
“I play opera music around my building,” said Thun. “I keep my place well-let, and any graffiti is tackled the next morning. So some guy will write something in the middle of the night and he will come back the next morning to show his friends and it’s already gone. I clean it up immediately because I have to show them that’s what’s going to happen and that’s the message I get through.
Thun said he expects there will be a corresponding spike in business at the grocery store, which is only three blocks south of the closed 20th Avenue food stores. With fewer options for people who live in the area and don’t have vehicles to go to other stores, which will almost certainly attract the street crowd which tends to hang around stores.
Thun set up a wireless alarm that backs up his hard-wired phone line to connect his property to a security monitoring service. When an intruder trips one of the sensors at any of his establishments in the shopping centre, if the wired phone line is cut, that will trigger a cell phone uplink system to send an alert to the security company. Several months ago, Thun was awakened at his home at 3 a.m. by a phone call from the security company to tell him the cell-phone system had been activated.
“It was a bad atmosphere, bad people, I’d say criminals, harassing us,” said Shah. “You can’t deal with them. They were taking drugs outside my store and whatnot. Six times they broke my glass in not even a year, and it’s so expensive.