Published: Just now
The day after a police operation, Leif, 66, was visited by two red-clad salesmen from Sector Alarm.
They wondered if he had heard about the police crackdown on his otherwise quiet residential street in Örebro and wanted to sell alarms.
– One wonders if they select customer visits based on current police raids. I think it’s deplorable, says Leif.
On Tuesday morning, several neighbors on a residential street in Örebro were woken up by a terrible noise. There were dogs barking and people screaming.
– It turned out that it was the task force that broke open the door to a neighboring house, says Leif, 66, who himself managed to sleep through the noise.
Later in the evening, Leif and his wife learned that two young men had been picked up by the police on suspicion of aiding and abetting murder.
When Leif came home yesterday at 3 p.m., he was met by two red-clad salesmen who introduced themselves and said they were from Sector Alarm.
– They wanted to sell me an alarm, but I, who worked as a security guard, know how long alarm times are and believe that alarms do not help. So I immediately said I wasn’t interested.
But the two red-clad sellers did not want to give up so easily, says Leif.
– No, then one of them asked if I had heard that there was a person on my street who had been arrested for murder. I corrected him immediately, as far as criminal classification is concerned. Then he became a bit of a lever, backed off and tried to mitigate the whole thing.
The red-clad sellers then had to leave Leif without having sold any alarms.
Leif says that he only began to reflect on Sector Alarm’s actions during the evening.
“Ugly to select customer visits after police raids”
– One wonders if they select customer visits based on current police raids. I think it’s deplorable, ugly and very unethical. To scare people like that and try to sell on it.
Leif says he understands that you are free to be entrepreneurial and that even unethical business ideas are allowed.
– But to go out the next day and point out that you need an alarm because someone has been arrested for attempted murder on your street, that’s pretty ugly.
Sector Alarm: Not our procedures
Sector Alarm writes in an email to Aftonbladet that it is not part of the company’s routine to read police reports before selecting customer visits.
“The salespeople who are out in the field can then receive the information that a break-in has occurred in the areas they work in, usually that information comes from the customers we visit as it becomes a fairly natural topic of conversation,” writes Axel Birgerstam, marketing director at Sector Alarm.
According to him, the company does not work systematically in any way to convey such information.
“Now I don’t know exactly what was said in the example you bring up, but we see it as natural in view of our services that we generally talk about risks of burglary with those we meet.”, writes Axel Birgerstan.