<Anchor> The



number of small-value theft crimes targeting unmanned stores without employees has increased significantly.



Reporter Ha Jeong-yeon reports that, due to the nature of unmanned stores, it is difficult to respond immediately to damage and the burden on the police is increasing.



<Reporter>



A man enters an unmanned store with his face covered with a mask and hat.



Putting on the gloves you have prepared, open the payment machine with a screwdriver and put the cash in the envelope.



A few days later, this man came back.



Again, the same method is used to collect money.



The man was caught by the police while robbing 12 unmanned stores in Incheon over the past three months.



[Damaged owner: When I woke up in the morning, the safe was stolen. It came back 5 days later and robbed me again. They were robbed twice and caught in other places, because the police were undercover.] The



crime of unmanned store theft has been on the rise recently.



Just looking at the number of arrests nationwide, the number of arrests increased nearly eightfold from 203 the previous year to 1,604 as of September of last year.



Police investigative power is also increasing in response to the rapidly increasing number of reports of damage.



Due to the nature of the unmanned store without resident staff, tracking only with CCTV for crime prevention, the process of arresting criminals is not easy like a robbery or murder investigation without any witnesses.



The situation in which front-line police officers, as well as homicide detectives, are deployed in large numbers.



This is the reason why some point out that unmanned store owners should take minimum security measures, such as attaching an alarm inside the payment machine.



[Lim Jun-tae/Professor of Police Administration Department, Dongguk University: When you enter from the beginning, you check your card, go in, check out the items, check again, and then come out.

.]



It seems necessary to take measures to reduce the waste of investigative power while considering the position of unmanned store owners who want to reduce operating costs.



(Video coverage: Choi Dae-woong, video editing: Park Chun-bae, CG: Shim Soo-hyun)