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Ottawa police are trying to crack down on theft at the Rideau Centre with a new pilot program launched earlier this month.<\/p>\n
The program began on April 1 and aims to identify patterns of coordinated thefts \u2014 when groups of people steal large quantities of merchandise from the mall’s stores. <\/p>\n
“Typically what’s happening now is we’re finding people are grabbing multiple units of whatever it is they’re taking and running out of the mall, and that’s the problem,” said acting Sgt. Stephen Plummer. <\/p>\n
The stolen items are then resold through organized channels, according to police. <\/p>\n
“One [goal] … is to better support the retailers, making them confident that when they report things that they will be investigated fully,” he said.<\/p>\n
CBC reached out Cadillac Fairview, the real estate company that owns the Rideau Centre, for comment. <\/p>\n
Jitesh Karamchandani, the mall’s general manager, declined an interview but said in an email the mall “remain committed to partnering with the police to implement meaningful safety measures.” <\/p>\n
The pilot is supposed to run until the end of September. While it’s currently focused on the Rideau Centre, Plummer said the hope is to expand the initiative to other parts of the city. <\/p>\n
This is not the first initiative from Ottawa Police focused on the downtown mall. <\/p>\n
Last year it conducted Operation Robin Hood, which resulted in three people being charged with multiple counts of theft. <\/p>\n
In a press release from September, police said the three were responsible for around $75,000 in stolen goods over the course of six months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 2 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":627017,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194295],"tags":[49,48,20739],"class_list":{"0":"post-627016","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ottawa","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-ottawa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=627016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627016\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/627017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=627016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=627016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=627016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}