Monday, April 15, 2013

Modern Life: Catching a Thief at a Church

Last Monday, during preschool hours at the church, a man walked in with his preschool age daughter. He immediately noticed a Samsung Galaxy II tablet unattended and untethered (huge mistake) to his left, just showing a slideshow of pictures.  He approached the counter to discuss reversing his earlier decision to enroll his daughter in the preschool and get a refund since she had not yet started.  During the first break in the conversation, he stepped over to the table with the tablet, casually removed it from its stand, and laid it flat on the table.  He returned to the counter.  During the second break in the conversation, he again stepped over to the table, this time casually placing papers over the top of the tablet to conceal it. Again, he returned to the counter. Finally, he took another opportunity during another conversation break to reach up and hand-turn the main camera view.  He and his daughter left, and the preschool later reported the tablet missing.

Read the rest of the report by Rick Knowles.

3 comments:

CincyCat said...

Ugh. This was frustrating to read.

Churches/non-profits tend to be overly trusting in so many ways. This is why we read (admittedly, rare) news reports of church employees embezzling tons of money. In these cases, the Board is either asleep at the wheel (if one exists at all), or the organization's leaders just "can't imagine that anyone who would work for us / embrace our mission would steal from us."

Proper governance and checks & balances procedures are critically important, no matter what your organization's mission happens to be. Even the Bible warns that we are to be as gentle as doves, but as wise/shrewd as serpents (Matthew 10:16).

Michael Wade said...

CincyCat,

I think Rick may take those to heart. He's pretty shrewd.

Michael

CincyCat said...

I wasn't 100% sure my comment would be posted. Thanks for sharing it. I admit that I didn't really drill down to see what role Rick has at the church, but I was glad to see that they even had security cameras in their preschool. (There are far too many that do not.) I'm glad the church was able to recover their tablet.