A liquor store employee was stabbed while another was pepper sprayed on Monday night, according to Edmonton police.
Around 8:10 p.m., two men entered the store in the area of 131 Avenue and 82 Street and allegedly pepper sprayed an employee in the face, police said.
In a news release sent out Wednesday, police said the second employee then followed the two suspects where an altercation took place, which is when the victim was stabbed.
Police say the man who was stabbed was transported to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
“It was very traumatic for them. It was something that we see more often than we want to see,” acting Sgt. Ben Davis said. “I don’t like seeing the violence, it’s avoidable.
“That instance of violence is more common than what hits the news, I’ll be honest with you. And the thing that’s not captured very often is the trauma experienced by those staff members, the mental health implications that follow.”
Davis said the frequency of liquor store thefts is on the rise not just in Edmonton, but across Alberta and across Canada.
“The frequency at some stores is so much that they’re not reporting as much as they should be. For example, there’s one location that — I have a good relationship with the manager — and I spoke with her and she provided me that they’ve had at least 40 instances of theft in the last three weeks. At one point it was five in one day.”
Davis said this highlights the need for preventative action to protect liquor store employees.
“When EPS partnered with ALCANNA on our pilot project to implement ID scanners in liquor stores, we found that theft and the violence associated with it were reduced by at least 94 per cent at former high-theft locations. We know this technology saves lives, and the EPS continues to advocate with government and the liquor industry to make ID scanners an industry-wide security standard.”
“It’s made a major difference. It keeps people honest when they’re in the stores and keeps bad people out,” Taylor Mann, Alcanna’s director of corporate investigations, said. “This tragedy this week shows that it’s not an Alcanna issue. It’s an industry wide issue.”
The EPS robbery section has taken over the investigation.
With files from Caley Ramsay, Global News.
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