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It’s Thursday night, and customers stream through Lee Rabahani’s tiny Halifax corner store for smokes and lottery tickets. Rabahani regales them with one-liners, questions about their health and their families, gentle ribbing. He knows most of them by name, and they leave grinning.
But when the shop empties briefly, he drops his voice and he’s no longer smiling. He loses so much to shoplifting he can’t keep track, he says. There was a time when he was broken into twice a week. “One time, this guy came in with a shotgun. He was shaking. He was all nervous and telling me to hand over the money. I thought, is this a joke?” The ex-Lebanese Army soldier pushed him, and when the shotgun came up to face level, he realized it wasn’t. The thief got away with $4,000.
After that incident, Rabahani dropped $20,000 on a state-of-the-art security system. Sixteen video cameras watch over his three tiny aisles. A console sits on the counter next to the till, able to recall any customer who might have stirred Rabahani’s suspicions during the day. Has it paid for itself yet? “I’ve got a family,” he shrugs. “It keeps me safe.”
A recent survey by Halifax-based think tank GPI Atlantic found that crime in Nova Scotia (there are no similar studies for the rest of Atlantic Canada) costs the province $1.5-billion a year, or 4.4 per cent of GDP, and much of that is borne by business. Thirty-seven-million is spent on alarms and surveillance systems; $66-million on private security guards; $205-million in business shrink (the unexplained disappearance of stock from shelves). And there are other, less tangible, costs to the economy. Lost production due to absenteeism following a criminal attack costs businesses $6.3-million; lost production due to murder, $16-million. Those losses have continued to mount, in spite of a slight dip in crime rates over the past decade. The GPI report speculates this is partly due to higher hospitalization costs, as well as higher insurance rates, which have failed to drop in the same period.
The past decade has been an anomaly: the long term trend shows that crime rates have actually risen dramatically in the past 40 years, and Ronald Colman, one of the report’s authors, says that has come at a cost. “If crime rates were still at their 1962 levels,” says Colman, “Nova Scotians could have saved about $850-million this year on extra spending on police, prisons, courts, lawyers, security guards, burglar alarms and a lot of other crime costs.”
As if they didn’t have enough to worry about, businesses are being increasingly targeted by sophisticated gangs with wide reaching networks and the technical know-how to steal credit card numbers from point-of-sale PIN pads and over the phone. According to the Retail Council of Canada, retailers across the country lost $500-million to credit and debit card fraud in 2006 alone. Tougher laws in the U.S. have led American gangs to re-establish in Canada and Christine James of the Retail Council of Canada fears Maritimers are particularly vulnerable. “We’re so friendly and warm and… definitely not suspicious and I think Atlantic Canadian retailers need to be aware that it may not be the person in their community who is robbing them.” In fact, a 2006 report by the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada shows Atlantic Canada has an estimated 17 street gangs, more per capita than Quebec or British Columbia, although considerably less than the country’s gang capital of Ontario.
Obviously, Atlantic Canada is no longer the country’s tranquil hinterland. In three of the four Atlantic provinces (PEI is the exception), violent crime rates now surpass the national average. Nowhere is this more evident than Halifax, which has seen a spate of murders and drive-by shootings in the last few years. Maclean’s magazine ranks Halifax as the country’s eighth most violent city.
While police say the crime is drug related, and law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear, the violence has an indirect effect on business. “It seems like everyday you’re reading about someone getting stabbed or robbed and I think that scares people away,” says Gordon Stewart, executive director of the Restaurant Association of Nova Scotia. He says bars and restaurants in downtown Halifax have been hurt hard by the negative publicity. How hard? “It’s up there with the recession.”
