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8 Crime Sci. 1 (2019)

handle is hein.journals/crimsci8 and id is 1 raw text is: Andresen etal. Crime Sci (2019) 8:1 https-//doi.org/1 0.1186/s40163-019-0096-x Crime Science S ~- CrossMark An evaluation of bylaw and policy changes on pharmacy robberies in British Columbia Martin A. Andresen*, Elliott Mann1,Tarah Hodgkinson2, Stephen Thacker3 and Bob Nakagawa4 Abstract On 15 September 2015, the College of Pharmacists of British Columbia (BC) implemented a set of by-law and security policy changes in an effort to reduce robberies and burglaries in BC pharmacies. Prior to these by-law and security policy changes, pharmacy robberies were increasing in BC for approximately 5 years. After implementation, pharmacy robberies decreased significantly. In this paper, we evaluate the potential impact of the by-law and security policy changes on pharmacy robberies in four regions within BC. We find strong evidence supporting that the reduction in pharmacy robberies is a result of this by-law and accompanying security policy changes. Specifically, there was an immediate and substantial drop in pharmacy robberies within Vancouver, with a change in trend (now decreasing instead of increasing) for the Interior and Lower Mainland less Vancouver. These results should be considered sup- port for maintaining these by-laws and security policy changes in BC and potential implementation in other areas of Canada experiencing similar issues. Keywords: Crime prevention, Pharmacies, Robbery, Situational crime prevention Introduction Pharmacy robbery is a growing concern for business owners across Canada (Fraser and Viau 2017). Accord- ing to Cotter et al. (2015), the use of illicit drugs in Can- ada is increasing while the methods for obtaining these drugs are diversifying (Felson and Staff 2017). More spe- cifically, in British Columbia (BC), and particularly Van- couver, pharmacy robberies have been increasing for a number of years, necessarily leading to an increase in the availability of illicit narcotics in the city during that time (Carman and Adhopia 2018). Last year, BC expe- rienced over 1400 illicit drug-related overdose deaths, the highest in Canada, with significant increases in 2016 and 2017 (BC Centre for Disease Control 2018; Special Advisory Committee on the Epidemic of Opioid Over- doses 2018); moreover, BC has almost double the rate of *Correspondence: andresen@sfu.ca S School of Criminology and Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BCV5A 1S6, Canada Full list of author information is available at the end of the article BMC the next highest province and a rate that is three times the national average. Similar drug-related issues have emerged in the United States and Australia (Henriques- Gomes 2018; Whelan 2018), making this an important public health issue. Pharmacies can be perceived as soft targets for rob- beries, because they contain a large quantity of narcotics (such as opioids), have low levels of formalized security and can promise a large payload in a short period of time. In an attempt to reduce robberies in Vancouver, specifi- cally, and British Columbia, more generally, the College of Pharmacists of British Columbia implemented by-law and security policy changes across the province. These changes came into effect 15 September 2015. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of these by-law and security policy changes on pharmacy robberies © The Author(s) 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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