Securing A Café Against Robbery

I had already written a series of blogs about a robbery-in-band that happened to us when we were still operating an Internet café. The case is still pending in a court of law but I am not expecting to recover any amount of money to compensate for the losses we incurred in the robbery. The robber that the police caught during the incident had jumped bail and there is practically no way that he will be apprehended again and made to pay for the damages that we incurred in our business. The incident plus the continuing occurrences of robberies by the so-called bolt-cutter gangs made me decide to again post a blog that will summarize some practices of existing café owners in order to secure their shops against the said criminals.

The above image is typical of what will happen if the bolt-cutter gang strikes on an establishment. Ordinary padlocks cannot protect your properties against these evil people. Many times, even special hardened steel padlocks would suffer the same consequences. So how do you protect your investment against this risk that seems to be very prevalent nowadays? Here are some of the current practices of Internet café owners whose place of business is not their place of residence:

• Stay-in Guy – to serve as sort of security guard, an Internet café owner would have his shop tender, a trusted someone or himself to sleep on the computer shop after it closes. Of course, you won’t have to do this if your café is often 24 hours a day and this is also the reason of some owners for operating that way. A word of caution, make sure that the stay-in guy has a way of getting out of the place should any emergency happen on the entrance area. Also, make sure that there is peripheral lighting that your stay-in guy can switch on if he senses that someone is trying to forcibly enter your shop.

• Burglar Alarm System – an alarm system that would trigger a loudspeaker to switch on if someone enters the premises when it is armed can be installed to secure a computer shop. Make sure to inform people staying nearby that somebody unauthorized tried to intrude your shop when the loudspeaker sounds. request them to call you or the police when that happens.

• CCTV Surveillance System – it is better if this security system is installed in your café aside from the burglar alarm. The closed-circuit television (CCTV) or a security webcam system with time-lapse recorder can help a lot in identifying the culprits should the robbers succeed in taking your computers. At present, an ordinary web camera and a PC can be used for the purpose so there is really no additional investment needed to have this kind of security system.

There could be other ways that café owners protect their investment against robbers but as someone who had experienced getting robbed, I want to say that getting and insurance cover against the risks of running the Internet café business is still the best security you could have. I have described in full the kind of insurance cover that an Internet café must have in the Classified section of this site.