Loss Prevention at Waldameer Park

Last fall, a teenage boy walked into Waldameer Park and Waterworld, where he had worked for the past three-plus years. Except this time, he didn’t come to the Erie, Pa., park to report for work or to play games with his friends, as he’d done many times before. This time, he was accompanied by his fuming mother, who brought him there so he could confess to his boss that he’d been stealing from them throughout the previous summer, when he had worked as an operator at the midway games area.

“He was somebody we trusted. He also told us he wasn’t the only one,” says Waldameer General Manager Steve Gorman. “He had shown other games employees how to steal.”

There’s no telling how much was ultimately taken from the park during the summer, but the incident caused Waldameer to ponder a fundamental question: how do they keep from being a victim of an errant employee in the future? “We talked with several parks during that long winter, and we learned that we were one of the few parks that didn’t have a surveillance system,”
Gorman says.

Over the past several months, Waldameer has been installing a top-notch GE Kalatel security system that will record each transaction and change the way money is transferred from the customer to the employee.

The culprit was a smart, college-bound Eagle Scout, and the scam was easy to pull off.

At the time, games operators wore aprons for easy transacting. When a monetary exchange was conducted, the operator took the money and stored it in the pockets of the apron. In this young man’s fleecing operation, he simply pocketed the cash for himself.

But under the new system, would-be thieves won’t have such an easy time of it. A new machine to be implemented at the counters will collect and process the money electronically.

When a patron pays to play a game, he or she inserts the dollar bill (the usual fee for playing these types of games) into a slot on the counter. The operator then pushes a button, enabling a suction device that sucks the money into a secure holding space, which is totally inaccessible by the employees. And as the machine collects the money, it also counts it.

Throughout the park 80 cameras are set up to keep track of each transaction that comes through the park, and also to keep an eye on the employees themselves. Each camera is wired to a central control station, where an employee (which they will hire once the operation is up and running) will constantly monitor the goings on of the entire park, not just the cash registers and game counters. Cameras are also installed at many of the rides in order to monitor crowds.

Another feature that makes this system a cut above others is a mechanism called Text. Every time a transaction is made on the cash register, the price and item is shown on the display inside the central control booth. That way, if there’s ever a question about who was working or how much the transaction was, the park’s administrators can go straight to a specific moment in the past and get the information they need.

“We bought a large computer storage,” Gorman says. “We can store weeks of data from all 80 cameras.”

Another obstacle to clear was setting up the new surveillance infrastructure, which involved, according to Gorman, roughly 10 miles of wire to link all 80 cameras to the central office.

And for future damage control, they’ve set up an anonymous way of letting supervisors know there might be someone dishonest is working behind one of their counters.

“Kids don’t like to turn each other in,” Gorman says. “But they can drop a note it the suggestion box, and we can go back and look it up.”

It was a sad day when Waldameer found out one of its own was stealing from the park. Even more frustrating is that although the boy is paying the park back, Gorman says it will likely not recoup all the money it lost at the hands of this one teenager.

Nonetheless, Gorman and his associates are pleased that their new security infrastructure is one of the best.

“We feel pretty confident that the new surveillance system will deter future theft,” Gorman says.