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Don Gwinn faced the audience, walked up and down the aisles and made eye contact with hundreds of students at a Loss Prevention Briefing Feb. 9 in hopes he would never have to see them in his office one day suspected of shoplifting.
“(Loss prevention briefings) are a proactive effort to get the word out to the kids and let them know what the ramifications are for shoplifting,” said Mr. Gwinn, U.S. Army Garrison Kaiserslautern’s civilian misconduct officer, who handles reported cases of crimes committed by U.S. Army-affiliated civilians receiving logistical support within the KMC.
Consequences, Mr. Gwinn said, range from losing on-post privileges, damaging future employment and education opportunities and causing serious trouble for the sponsoring parent. He added that shoplifting harms everyone, especially in the military community, since Army and Air Force Exchange Service profits help fund Family and Morale, Welfare and Recreation programs.
Starting last year, Mr. Gwinn joined in on the established AAFES-Europe Loss Prevention Briefings held at KMC elementary, middle and high schools.
“When (Army) kids are caught shoplifting in one of our stores, Mr. Gwinn processes the actual cases and determines whether they should receive any certain type of punishment,” said Kenneth Randell, the AAFES-E Loss Prevention manager, on why it made sense for them to team up for these briefings.
Mr. Randell regularly presents these briefings to Department of Defense Dependents Schools in the KMC, Mannheim and Baumholder.
“I just want to let them know that they may not have gotten caught yet, but (AAFES) does have a camera system in place, and I do have detectives who are out there and eventually, they will get caught,” he said.
Beside the consequences Mr. Gwinn listed, Mr. Randell said AAFES has its own procedure for punishing shoplifters by exacting a $200 civil recovery fee. For example, if someone walks out of the store without paying for a 50 cent pack of gum, it will then cost $200.50.
Mr. Randell and Mr. Gwinn conducted briefings for Kaiserslautern Elementary School fifth graders last year. So far this year, they have done briefings at the Kaiserslautern middle and high schools, breaking up the briefings for each grade.
“We have assemblies all the time, but the kids were so attentive, and I think the message really got through to them,” said KMS principal Dr. Susan Hargis about the briefings held for her sixth, seventh and eighth graders. “The real important part was the question and answer because the kids asked a lot of thought-provoking questions and (Mr. Randell and Mr. Gwinn) were able to answer them.”
Mr. Gwinn said they plan to conduct loss prevention briefings in the future at all 11 KMC schools, starting with Ramstein schools in March. The last briefing they conducted was Feb. 9 for KMS seventh graders.
KMS seventh-grader Caitlin Hutchison attended the briefing and said she thought it was interesting.
“You know a lot of this stuff nobody would tell you when you were little because you would be all scared and stuff, but now, it’s important to learn it,” she said.
Caitlin’s mother, Amanda Hutchison, also attended the briefing, and the shoplifting statistics surprised her, she said.
“Wow. Seventy percent of shoplifting here, as Mr. Gwinn said, occurs from kids 9 to 17 years old,” she said. “It just surprised me that so much (shoplifting) was done by kids.”
Mr. Gwinn hopes to decrease this percentage by doing these briefings and letting this age group know the consequences of shoplifting.
“They really get a lot of action taken against them,” he said. “Host nation (officials) can also take action against them for shoplifting.”
