Tough Economic Times Bring Crime Increase

How many people out there feel they are immune to crime? Well, I'm here to tell you YOUR NOT. Today an incident reconfirmed that for myself and everyone at Guardian Self Defense. Our office areas are in a large building and we share space with a few other companies. Most days tend to bring a good amount of traffic in and out. It is not uncommon to see people that you don't know or recognize. This morning during a brief meeting one of our employees returned to the office to find her wallet missing. Immediately, we began helping her retrace her day. We came up empty everywhere we went. To make matters worse this young lady was married less than a month ago and just returned from the honeymoon. Today she was carrying a good amount of cash, all her credit cards, a debit card, social security card, and marriage license. As the word began to get out, we quickly realized someone had walked right into her office and stole that wallet. In less than an hour five different workers (from other companies) came by and all gave very similar descriptions of a strange man they saw wandering the halls. All gave reported the same approximate time frame, which happened to be the same time frame as our meeting. I quickly caught myself thinking, how could this happen? We live and breath self defense. We consult with small businesses and homeowners to prevent this sort of thing. After a few minutes I stopped myself. Bottom line, we let our guard down. We allowed ourselves to get comfortable. We felt a false sense of security. A we became victims in our own office! To say I was mad, well that's an understatement. I told my employees..."This will never happen again." While we waited for the police I went into our warehouse and began to review our surveillance videos. We don't have cameras in the offices but we do have the entry ways covered. It didn't take long to see the same guy coming and going multiple times. He looked nervous, out of place and up to no good. He closely matched the description given earlier. He quickly made his way out one last time and disappeared into the tree line behind the building. The police came and took our report. Within hours they had him! In that short amount of time he rang up over $12,000 in fraudulent credit card transactions. I've heard it said, "What doesn't kill you, will make you stronger." I told my employee (the victim), we can approach this in one of two ways. We can be mad, upset and pissed at the world. Or we can learn from it and use this experience to help educate others. We opted for the latter and all agreed we would work hard together to ensure the highest level of self defense going forward. Please evaluate your personal security situation. Have you become immune to crime? Are you comfortable in your environment, feeling that false sense of security? Are you aware of what is going on around you? How about your wife, your children or mother. Guardian Self Defense Products