You might want to rethink it. Their "reward" for an employee who chased off a man who was assaulting a female employee was to fire him.
Yup, you got that right. Man comes to the assistance of his colleague, preventing further assault (perhaps even rape or murder), and is rewarded by being fired. You can let SuperAmerica know your opinion on this here.
H/T True North.
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This isn't the first time someone's been fired for something like this. I've heard of stuff like this before. The rationale is that if they forbid their employees from taking on criminals, it's less likely to escalate into something where someone (employee or bystander) could be hurt who otherwise would not have been. And it's not a bad policy most of the time. And, if they don't fire employees for serious breaches of policy, how can the policy be taken seriously? Yet this situation is just wrong.
There has GOT to be a way of having a policy in place that protects your employees and customers by discouraging counter-productive heroics, without punishing those who genuinely stop crimes of violence. I don't know what it is, but maybe they should get someone other than a lawyer to come up with the policy.
The trouble is with the initial assumption; that confronting criminals escalates the situation. Generally, that isn't true. The safest thing to do in a confrontation with a criminal is to reveal your status as a carry permit holder(by pulling your gun, not your permit), followed by noncompliance and fighting back. The worst thing you can do, statistically speaking, is to let him have his way.
So what we have here is a policy predicated on completely flawed assumptions.
Maybe the policy for employees would be a basic self-defense/carry permit class? Man, I'd love to see the HR Brady types hyperventilating at THAT one. :^)
Does that hold true in situations where there is a reasonable belief that the criminal doesn't want to hurt anyone, he never intended to hurt anyone, and he's just using the gun to get money out of your cash register, though?
I can definitely see where what you say is true in situations where the criminal's intent is to do harm. But a lot of the time, the LAST thing these holdup guys want is to get involved with violence instead of making a clean, quick getaway. And that's what the policy is designed to deal with, though the flaw in it is that it overlooks situations where the intent is clearly to do harm, such as the above.
I suspect that even in these situations, drawing the weapon is still the most effect deterrent, IF the person who does it doesn't act like a complete idiot. But how is the convenience store management supposed to separate employees who will act like idiots, from ones who will respond appropriately in the situation? They don't (and can't) base hiring decisions on people's self-defense sense -- there aren't enough sensible people with carry permits willing to work for minimum wage out there.
Oops, sorry, you did cover that in your last paragraph. But again, for a the kind of job that gas station cash register jockey tends to be -- I doubt it could be cost-justified, no matter how good an idea it is.
I bet you could cost justify it; the cost of life insurance and lawsuits for "failing to adequately secure premises" versus $100/employee or less for permit training.
You don't actually buy them the gun, of course, but I would think any training course would be better than simply handing them a packet and telling them "read it."
Assuming a certain portion even could.
...I'm not even sure you would have to separate the reasonable from the unreasonable carry permit-ees. If Joey Bandit knows that xyz corp has training for carry permits, he's going to go to elsewhere, so you never need to worry about "Stupid Employee with Carry Permit"...
and, I think you did say this in your last paragraph, PM (happy mothers day x 5, btw), but even in the situation where a robber doesn't want to do anything but make a clean getaway, pulling a gun on him seems to be the most likely way to get him to leave w/o harming anyone. I'm surprised by Bert's comment about the safest thing to do in a confrontation being to pull a gun and/or fight back, but if it's true, that takes care of the major complaint.
Believe it or not, it's true. Now one caveat here; someone has the "jump" on you, and all he asks for is money or Bug Light--yeah, give it to him. If he wants to assault, rape, or kill...well, that's when you start fighting back.
Plus, the response I got from SA was "what if they've got a gun but haven't pulled it yet?" Somehow I find that a very dubious proposition; someone has a weapon, wants to commit a crime, but doesn't lead with the weapon? Making it much harder to complete the theft? Huh?
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