According to NBC Bay Area, one company – Core Mart – kickstarted the trend by hiring armed security to accompany drivers making deliveries. This comes as delivery drivers in the South Bay say they are increasingly worried about becoming the targets of robbery.
The San Jose Police Department (SJPD) said it saw a slight increase in the robbery of delivery trucks two years ago, but noted that it hasn't seen a spike in such incidents lately. NBC Bay Area reached out to Core Mart's parent company, but it declined to explain why the armed guards are deployed.
Flavio Lopez, an employee of another delivery company, expressed his desire for a guard or at least a second person to help monitor goods. While he hasn't been robbed, Lopez has had run-ins downtown. "Stuff you [got to] deal with downtown; it is what it is," he told NBC Bay Area.
Darrell Cortez, a retired SJPD officer who now works in corporate and retail security, noted that if one company was using the guards, others in the industry would likely follow suit and adopt the strategy.
"Unfortunately, this is what society has become now with armed guards guarding merchandise from the retailer – because there seems to be a sense of lawlessness in our society," he remarked.
"It's very unfortunate. You and I pay for it. The consumer pays for it on the backend because prices increase, because the merchandise is going out the door and no one is stopping the bad guys because of the threat of violence."
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ZeroHedge's Tyler Durden commented on the development, sarcastically noting that California "sounds like a wonderful place to do business."
"Things have gotten so utopian in the state of California [that] delivery drivers are being accompanied by armed guards due to 'crime concerns' while out making deliveries – which means that somewhere in a board room, it likely made more financial sense to pay for all new security staff than it did to continue to allow drivers to get robbed (and inventory lost) as was happening prior." (Related: Organized retail crime, not just shoplifting, is surging across the U.S. with dangerous and costly consequences.)
Delivery trucks prone to being robbed
Crimes targeting delivery trucks and their drivers aren't isolated to California. In January, two instances of truck thefts were reported in Memphis.
The first instance involved the armed robbery of a FedEx truck, where four men clad in all-black and wearing ski masks took several packages from it. The second instance happened hours after the FedEx truck was targeted. In the same manner, three men wearing all-black stole packages from a UPS delivery truck.
Long-distance trucker Robert Kwasniewski also recounted his experience of being victimized while just trying to stop at a gas station in Bluff City. The incident, he told Action News 5, made him wary of stopping in Memphis.
"[I] open the door to get out, and I see a guy run from the back of my trailer with a box in his hands," said Kwasniewski. "I'm like, 'Man, what are [you all] doing?"
"It's a shame and it is scary, but I am not coming through Memphis anymore and I'm not even going to stop. [This] puts us … truck drivers in a bad position because coming from Michigan going west, you exactly run out of time right on the border, right before you get to Arkansas you are going to run out of time."
Head over to Collapse.news for more stories about rising crime and theft all over the country.
Watch Gabor "Gabe" Zolna predicting that armed guards will be deployed in front of grocery stores in the clip below.
This video is from the zolnareport.com channel on Brighteon.com.
More related stories:
Grocery stores hiring armed security teams to ward off rising thefts.
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