 | Bob Crager of Lewis Street Glass is a 26 year veteran in the glass business. Lewis Street Glass is a leading Wichita Glass company, serving the entire Wichita/Sedgwick County area since 1919. They do anything and everything having to do with glass, both residential and commercial. They also do Auto glass. They are located at 743 South Market, facing Kellogg on the South, and you can reach them by phone at (316) 263-8259. You can email Bob Crager at bcrager@lewisstreetglass.com |
Glass
2006-06-01 10:04:00
Are local banks using ‘man traps’?
Question: I read recently that local banks are using ‘man traps’ with bullet proof glass to help in employee and customer safety. Is that true?
ANSWER: In a recent column we reported about the banking industry using devices known as ‘Man Traps’ with ballistic glass to attempt to address the customer safety issues that have to be dealt with in the banking business. While going to the bank has never been easier, the convenience of having a teller on virtually every street corner has also given potential robbers a lot more choices. Competition for customers is driving bank expansion throughout the country, also fueling the push for extended and increasingly irregular banking hours. Many consumers can now apply for home equity loans on a Sunday night where they buy their groceries. Wild, huh?If a new bank moves into a certain market, all the other banks take notice, and will work to adopt any changes the new bank may have brought because of competitive concerns. And while holdups are not a new problem for this industry, enacting security changes to deter potential robbers can be challenging, especially when consumers expect more access to their money, not less. Banks are kind of caught between a rock and a hard spot. Because as you make a business easier to access for customers, you could be making it easier access for robbers too. Nationally, there were fewer bank robberies in the U.S. last year. But current figures provided by the Chicago-area FBI office show that the number of holdups in Chicago have been on the rise for several years, which culminated with a record 238 hold-ups in 2005. The increase has coincided with a Chicago-area bank building boom that has outpaced the rest of the country, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. There's just more targets out there for bank robbers to hit. The rise in robberies has led some banking executives to evaluate their security measures, but finding the right balance between security of customers and tellers, and convenience, is difficult. One high-tech deterrent, a vestibule that tellers can lock as an offender tries to escape, was disabled at a bank in a predominantly black neighborhood in Chicago after community activists protested the so-called "man trap" doors in 2004. These vestibules are in use at some local banking and credit unions in Wichita. The important thing is to try to use the right level of security for each individual branch, and there are tellers at some Chase banks now working behind bullet-resistant glass. Nova Comm Security Systems has made man-trap doors for banks in Florida, Detroit, Beverly Hills, Calif., and other U.S. cities. Their units feature a metal detector that screens customers for weapons before they can enter the bank. Most consumers have expressed little opposition to the products. In most areas, if you educate the customer and the staff the right way, and let them know that this is there for their protection, they can understand that. Some banks are also restricting what customers wear. After several of its 33 branches were hit by the same ski-mask-wearing robber, West Suburban Bank in Chicago installed signs asking customers to remove their hats, hoods and sunglasses. The Lombard, Ill.-based company says a similar program in Missouri reduced the number of robberies in participating banks by 40 percent. Authorities are still analyzing data for 2005, but preliminary figures show that there were 6,800 bank robberies in the U.S. That's fewer than in 2004, when there were 7,556 robberies, or 2003, when 7,465 bank robberies were reported. The funny thing is there is no rhyme or reason to the fluctuations. If you go back and look at the numbers for the last 20 years, you'll see it goes up and it goes down. There's no specific trend. Some information was researched from the world wide web.
