I work in a bank. My office is in a regular bank branch. There are security procedures we must go through each morning before we open to make sure everything is secure.
We are audited on our opening procedure. One of the requirements is that we cannot exit our car if an unknown person is parked in our lot. We have to call the police and they come ask the person to move. This very rarely happens…like 2x in 3 years.
If I were a bank customer and the bank was my first errand of the day, I think I would park in front of the entrance to the bank and wait if I got there before it opened. I don’t think I would realize it is a security issue. Would you?
I think about it now, but that’s only because that’s how the bank two blocks from my house got robbed before opening. An employee was just trying to get into the building, and was overpowered and forced to let the robber in. The employees still park and wait for another employee to be ready to exit their car as well before walking to the doors together.
I wouldn’t, although I should. We had a similar policy in place when I was a manager at Blockbuster: when leaving the store in the morning (before opening) with the bank deposit, we couldn’t exit if there was a non-employee parked or standing outside.
It’s just not high my radar as an issue, though. Sorry. :smack:
Definitely wouldn’t occur to me as a security issue. newscrasher, what if you recognize the car and the person sitting in it, or waiting at the door? If its a known customer, would everything be okay? Or would you still have to have them removed? You said ‘unknown’; I didn’t know if that meant non-bank personnel or an unknown customer.
Is that really how it is worded? If you pull in and can clearly see that the person parked in the lot is Charles Manson (assume he has been paroled) could you then exit your car, since he is not “unknown”?
Interesting… there’s no way that could work around here, since it’s a heavily urban area and many banks are located in shopping center-like plazas that share a lot with many other stores. What, are police going to clear the whole lot every day for the bank employees? Most likely they do the tandem thing another poster mentioned.
And I have to ask – does anyone really KNOW anyone else? Hell, I don’t understand half the things I myself do. I wouldn’t claim to know any of my co-workers.
And besides, how does a a person park? I mean, they park a car, but I can’t recall ever seeing any person, known or unknown, parked in a lot.
I used to work at a bank, so, yeah, I can see it being something to cause concern. I don’t remember anyone being in the parking lot; our lobby hours were 9 AM M-F. If they were there before we were, it would be waiting in the drive-through and we would open up anyway. They usually would be lined up early on the first of the month, so it wasn’t surprising when we saw them there.
Something similar happened to my wife when she was working at a bank. She and her co-worker arrived at 6:30 to open the bank and found someone sitting in the drive-thru lane. They had to call the police, who told the customer to come back later. The customer was not pleased, but it is company policy, and it is kind of weird to be waiting in the parking lot of the bank before it opens. Similarly, there was a policy that the two closing employees each had to watch each other leave the premises, to ensure that one of them could not be unknowingly attacked by someone trying to rob the bank.
Yes, I would recognize it as a security issue. As mentioned, over-powering a person opening a door is a common robbery technique.
I would REALLY expect a bank (of all businesses) to have a much simpler, discreet, method of dealing with the risk without waiting for the police to show up and clear the whole friggin’ area for them. Like, maybe, having their OWN security forces, maybe? Jeesh
I believe that my mom’s bank would be opened by someone with no access to the cash. Then the person with the access would show up later, they would use visual clues like the date on a large calendar to show safety for the person with the access. That way the first person couldn’t give the cash, and when the second person showed they would know something was wrong and could leave and call the cops without entering the bank.
I don’t think that having the bank opened by someone without access to the vault is really a good idea. Now, if a wanna be bank robber is rational, s/he’ll believe that the employee can’t open the vault…maybe. Or maybe s/he’ll think that the employee is just being stubborn. But how many robbers/wanna be robbers are all that rational? More than likely, the robber is NOT rational, but IS prone to violence. In which case, the employee is going to be the target of the robber’s rage. So a bank with this policy might not get robbed, but instead have a maimed or murdered employee.
I had not considered the security issue as told by the OP, but I can see the reason behind it now.
The point is that at all times you have people on both sides of the door that can call the cops. Either the first person is kidnapped and the second person calls the cops, or the second person is kidnapped and the first person sets off the alarm. By keeping the keys to the vault and the door segregated you complicate the robbery greatly. If the threat of violence was all you needed to rob a bank they would get robbed all the time.
I was wrong in how I first described it, it was a two key vault and the first person had the door and #1 key and the second had the #2 key. The point remains the same, by separating access and using separate, changing, visual cues you make all parties more secure.
Why pay for security when the cops will do it for free? And I think actual cops are far more likely to get compliance than rent-a-cops. Besides, if the person in the lot makes a fuss, you can bet who the rent-a-cops will call – the real cops.
Huh, we didn’t have this policy when I worked for a bank, but for the last bank I worked at had branches in strip malls, where there’s a lot of “strange” cars and people. Especially since we always seemed to have skeevy liquor stores as co-occupants of those shopping centers.
Once when I was manager I got a call very late at night from the police dispatcher saying that the bank’s alarm was going off and that as the “responsible party” I was to get over there RIGHT NOW to check the place out and turn off the alarm. They told me squad cars would intercept me en route and escort me, and to put a rush on it :p. They didn’t have to tell me twice: I fired up the (red) Fiat, put the convertible top back and hauled ass to the bank. My escorts were quite impressed with my time.
Not impressed enough, however, to keep me from having to go in the dark bank branch alone and do a search of the premises for intruders or other suspicious stuff, while about 30 cops with abbreviated-barrel shotguns waited outside for me to post the all-clear signal.
The local police decided recently to not send cars out any longer to check out retail store alarms, to the the high incidence of false alarms. there were a lot of shop owners and managers pretty damn pissed. “So I’m supposed to go in and search the place for thieves, and call the cops if I find them?”
Yes, but I’ve worked in a bank before. We had to do this too. This was in the late 90s-early 2000s.
Among the first thing we covered in orientation as CSRs – the first half of the first morning of training – was things like this, along with what to do if one of our relatives were kidnapped to force us to help rob the bank.