The Public Safety Committee of the Nassau County Legislature is holding a hearing into what exactly happened at the local Wal-Mart on 'Black Friday' when a temporary employee was trampled to death after a crowd of around 2,000 customers broke the door and rushed in to the store. The chairman of the committee said the hearing was an attempt to find out what happened in order to prevent similar tragedies in the future.
A major theme in the hearing was an insistence that Wal-Mart was responsible for crowd control at their own store, not the county or the police because the store is private property.
Here's the article from newsday:
Cop: Customer safety 'onus' on retailersStores, not the police, are responsible for protecting customers when large crowds form, as happened on Black Friday in Valley Stream when a security guard was trampled to death by a surging mob of shoppers, Nassau County officials testified Wednesday.
"These types of situations in the box stores and these door-buster type sales, the onus or responsibility for the security and the safety of the customers falls with the retail establishment," Nassau County Police Insp. Thomas Krumpter told members of the Public Safety Committee of the Nassau County Legislature.
The county's commissioner of emergency management, James Callahan, sounded a similar theme, testifying that, "being on private property, it really is the responsibility of the stores themselves."
Legis. Joseph Scannell (D-Baldwin), chairman of the committee, said prior to the hearing that he hoped to, "shine a light on what happened so we can prevent it from happening in the future."
However, Scannell and Legis. John Ciotti (R-North Valley Stream) said they would be careful in their questioning of witnesses because of possible lawsuits against the county and the police.Krumpter, the department's liaison to the legislature, told the committee that he would not testify about details of the incident, in which a store security guard was killed and five other people injured in the stampede on the day after Thanksgiving.
None of the committee members asked questions about what happened that day.
Scannell said during a break in the hearing that he was "attempting to strike a balance" between the county's potential liability in a lawsuit and the need for legislation.
After the meeting, he said staff lawyers were drawing up legislation, to be introduced in January, that would require stores to erect barriers a distance from the front doors when large crowds form. He said the would require stores to file crowd control plans with the Police Department.
Police Commissioner Lawrence Mulvey has scheduled a meeting with Wal-Mart and officials of other stores next week to discuss crowd control, Krumpter said.
Wal-Mart was invited to testify, according to Scannell, and instead sent Ted Potrikus of the Retail Council of New York State, which has about 5,000 members, including Wal-Mart.
Potrikus said his group generally opposed local regulations on retailers, and he expected the Wal-Mart death would come in the next session of the state legislature.
Posted by Taylor - December 10, 2008 03:14 PM - In The News