Caged dairy owner: ‘My safety matters more than anything’

Fiza Nadeem, owner of the Kennedy Road Dairy in Napier has gone to extreme measures to protect her safety at work. Photo / Neil Reid

For 12 hours a day dairy owner Fiza Nadeem serves her customers from behind the safety of a steel cage.

Stretching across the width of the counter of the Kennedy Road Dairy, on the outskirts of central Napier, the grilled steel is a sign of the very real danger that hardworking dairy owners, and other retailers, around New Zealand are increasingly facing, day and night.

And protective barriers are set to become more common amid rising safety fears, says the Dairy and Business Owners Group.

In November, Auckland dairy worker Janak Patel was killed in an alleged aggravated robbery, while a few weeks later, a worker at a Hamilton superette had two fingers cut off by a machete-wielding man.

Nadeem – whose shop was targeted by a ram raid in September – said some customers were put off by her steel bars.

“People do come in and say to me, ‘Oh, you are the back of a cage’, like I am working in the back of a jail,” she told the Herald.

“But I turn around and say, ‘My safety matters more than anything’. I feel safe under this, seriously I do.

“Before I could go out [and walk around the shop]. But after the ram raid I feel more scared. We can’t do much about [about crime]. It is a bit scary to own a dairy shop now, very scary.”

Nadeem said her barrier was the only one of its kind at a Napier dairy.

As well as the cage, other security measures at the store included a panic button and a recently installed fog cannon.

Napier's Kennedy Road Dairy was the scene of a ram raid in September, with repairs still to be completed. Photo / Neil Reid

As retail crime increased, other dairy owners from the Hawke’s Bay region had visited to see how the cage affects interactions with customers and whether something similar could be installed in their own stores.

The fear Nadeem feels at times was shared by many of her counterparts.

“When a group of kids of teenagers come, and they are wearing hoodies, I know some of them are not bad people, but ... but you have your hand right where the panic button is ... I do.”

Nadeem has owned the Kennedy Road Dairy for the past six years and had the cage installed a year in for her safety.

When five people ram-raided the store after-hours in September, the cage meant the intruders only escaped with two packets of chocolate biscuits and an empty till box.

Sheets of thick plywood now cover the hole where the large glass windows the bandits busted through had once been.

“Because of the cage they could not get in [behind the till], they couldn’t get the smokes or anything like that,” she said.

“After five years, when you have a shop and you build it, and then somebody comes and breaks in ... it is sad. It was heart-breaking seeing my dairy being ram-raided.”

Dairy and Business Owners Group chairperson Sunny Kaushal said cages were starting to become more common in south Auckland.

And he believed they would spread further around New Zealand given the many high-profile ram raids and aggravated robberies of daries.

“More business owners and workers are encaging themselves in, more like a jail-like structure,” he said.

“It is a very unfortunate, a very sorry state of affairs of New Zealand. We never expected New Zealand to get like this.”

The fog cannon at Nadeem’s dairy was funded as part of the Government’s strategy to prevent retail crime.

Fiza Nadeem says her safety is her priority and believes other dairy owners will follow her lead. New Zealand Herald photograph by Neil Reid

She has also approached Napier City Council for approval to install a bollard on the footpath near the large front window where ram raiders gained entry to the store in September.

Harsher penalties was the only way authorities could effectively crack down on rising crime, she said.

“Just a smack on the hand is nothing, or putting someone in a [home detention] bracelet,” Nadeem said. “We can not hit them back ... but they can hit us. That is wrong. We need harsh punishments.”