Aware And Prepared

Holiday Shopping Safety Tips: How To Avoid Jugging and Stay Safer in Parking Lots

• Mandi Pratt • Season 3 • Episode 33

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How do I stay safer while out and about this holiday season or any season? In part one of the Holiday Safety Series, Mandi breaks down two key topics: jugging and parking lot safety, so you can move through the holidays with more confidence.

 You’ll learn how jugging works, what red flags to watch for, smart habits that keep you from looking like a target, and practical parking-lot strategies that make a big difference. This episode gives you simple, real-world tools to help you stay aware, calm, and empowered all season long. 


RESOURCES


Mandi’s Toolkit with ALL the tips to keep you safer


Past episodes Tips From 911 Dispatcher Part 1 and Part 2


Connect with Mandi:


The primary purpose of the Women Aware and Prepared Podcast is to educate and inform. This podcast series does not constitute advice or services. Please use common sense for your own situation.

 Hey, brave one. Welcome to the Aware and Prepared Podcast. I'm your host, Mandy Pratt, trauma informed, resilient speaker, domestic violence victim advocate, and narcissistic abuse survivor. Here we keep it real with true crime stories and real world strategies to prevent emotional and physical harm. My guests and I share a mix of insight and survivor grit, all to help you feel safer, trust yourself more.

Deeply and live with greater peace and power. Let's trade fear for freedom and step into the peace that you deserve.

Hey there, it's Mandy with the Aware and Prepared Podcast. Welcome in to part one of our holiday safety series. Christmas, Hanukkah, all the fun is right around the corner. And while it's a season full of joy and connection, it's also the time of year. When theft and targeting crimes tend to spike, so I'm bringing back two of the most practical episodes I've ever done all about Jugging and parking lot safety.

What the heck is jugging? It is when you run to the ATM to grab some cash or you make a obvious big purchase. Somebody's watching you from the parking lot or the store they know to follow you back to where you're at so they can steal that from you. So whether you're running into the store for last minute gifts, making a quick stop at the ATM or juggling a full car of shopping bags.

I want you to feel more calm, more confident, and not so much like a target. So in this episode, you'll learn how jugging actually works, what to look for when you're out and about, and how small choices, like where you park or how you walk to your car can make a big difference. So let's jump in so you can finish the season feeling more empowered and less anxious.

Some of you may be connected with the app called Nextdoor, and while that's great to see what's going on in your neighborhood, there's also a lot of drama. So I don't like to have drama in my life, so I choose instead to look at the police reports. They send out news releases. So how do you get these? You can call your local police department on their non-emergency number, so you can look that up in your maps and find that and call them and just say, Hey, I would like to get your news releases to find out what's going on in my city.

Or you might want to try to go online to their website. You go to your city website and go to the police. Department and then you look up and see if you can sign up there. So I am still signed up with another city that we used to live in, but I still keep it because it shows me crime trends that are happening in our area.

So do you know what Jugging is recently? A victim drove from Los Angeles to a nearby city, which is about an hour away. After picking up many jewelry items, the victim arrived home and walked inside. The victim returned to his vehicle five minutes later and found his rear window shattered. The jewelry and US currency were stolen from inside the car.

So the detectives investigated and identified two suspect vehicles involved in the burglary, and a couple days later, these detectives continued the investigation and both suspect vehicles were stopped during traffic stops back in the area of Los Angeles. Through investigation, these detectives realized that both of these residents from Los Angeles were identified and arrested for vehicle burglary.

They were booked at a local detention center. The investigators figured out after their investigation that the suspects followed the victim from Los Angeles and targeted this vehicle because of the contents inside. This criminal technique is known as jugging. Often criminals follow unsuspecting individuals from locations such as banks or ATMs with the intent to commit burglary.

So these deputies are urging the public to remain aware of their surroundings and not to leave valuable items unsecured in vehicles. Of course, we've also mentioned this too, if you believe you're being followed, vary your route and contact law enforcement if you're being followed. If it's safe, you're gonna make keep making right hand turns.

Or you could keep making left hand turns and you're making a circle basically, and you're seeing are is the car behind me still following me? They've just made like one turn, another turn, another turn. It would be like at least three turns if they're still following you. That's kind of a tip off, and you can either go to the local police department or fire department, start honking your horn.

Or probably best is you can just call 9 1 1 and you can let them know that you think you're being followed and you just got money out of the ATM. So let them know the whole story. Remember, in one of the past episodes, I also had a dispatcher on and she taught us how to call 9 1 1 and what to expect. So if you wanna review that, that's awesome.

Lessons learned from this. Would be number one, pay attention to being followed. Does that mean that you have to be always looking over your shoulder? No. The whole point of what I'm teaching is to help us have more peace of mind. So it's only being aware of our surroundings. So if you keep making turns and you're noticing the same car is behind you, that's your intuition telling you to pay attention and actually do something about it.

And then also. Remembering to not leave contents that are of value or even looking like they're of value in your car, because that's a perfect invitation for a criminal to bust into your car and take it out. So even if it's a backpack that doesn't have anything great in it, they don't know that. So they're curious and they're gonna wanna grab that thing.

So if you were this guy. And you came out to your car and you realized the rear window was shattered, but you just parked. I would probably run back into my house, lock the door, and I would call 9 1 1. If you feel like you are still in danger, or let's say that you left your car, you came back in and you heard a noise outside and you saw them smashing into your window, right?

You could call 9 1 1. Or if you know that they're already gone, you can call the non-emergency number again, you can go back to our episode about calling 9 1 1. And Glenna, who is the dispatcher that was our guest, she talks about when to call nine one one and when to call the non-emergency number.

Usually at the police departments, it goes to the same people. It goes to dispatch, but it helps them determine how to prioritize the phone call. So be aware of what's going on in your local area, so get connected with your police department and get those news releases, and then pay attention to your surroundings, and then you learned what to do when being followed, and I hope that serves you well.

Now that you know what Jugging looks like and how to spot it early, let's zoom out a little bit because many of these crimes actually start or end in a parking lot. So let's talk about what to look for before you ever even open your car door. And what to do next. I talk a lot about car door locks because when you go to the store and you lock your car, go in the store and you come back out, um, if there's somebody you know wandering the parking lot, who wants to do somebody harm, if they happen to see you go in, they know, oh, there's a lady coming back to this car, so I'm gonna keep an eye on her car.

So when you come back. I would just be mindful of which locks you are unlocking in your car. So first of all, make sure it's safe, right? There's nobody like suspicious looking, hanging outside of your car. And then if that's the case, I would only unlock my driver's side door when I'm by myself because if somebody suspicious is in a car next to me that I can't see yet or something, it's easy for them to open their car and jump into my front passenger or back passenger.

If it's unlocked, so I don't just walk up to my car and like unlock all the doors I used to, but now I don't. So I only unlock the door that I need, and again, I've kind of paid attention and made sure that nobody suspicious is in my car or around my car. If that were the case, then if somebody was suspicious but they weren't in my car, then.

I could wait a minute or I could ask like a clerk to come out and just make sure I'm okay and I get in the car, right? You could do that. Once you get in the car, lock the door. So a lot of times we will get back into our car and then we'll fidget around for a second with our shopping bag or our phone or whatever.

So it's important to just as soon as you get in, lock your door. Ideally, that's not really the place that we're checking our phone. Like we can go drive to another parking lot right there, another space, and check our phone if we need to. All right. Let's talk about loading your car. So I have some stickup mirrors in the back of my car.

So when it's open, my lift gate is open and I'm loading up groceries. I have these little mirrors that show me who's behind me. So a lot of times I forget to check them, but I know that they're there. So it's an option for me to have, and you can just buy those off Amazon. They're super cheap and little and easy if you're loading in the passenger area.

I, I don't recommend like leaning all the way in 'cause it's easy, easy to be pushed in and then somebody can take control. So, um, you could always. Keep, uh, one foot on the floorboard so you have some leverage, right? That makes it easy for you to push back out. And again, the typical don't be distracted, right?

So try to have your hands free and, uh, you could use your shopping cart as a. Buffer between you and somebody else. So you can keep that there. I've seen, um, other instances where other moms have shared that they, when they're loading up their kids, that they put the shopping cart. So you got the door open and then the shopping cart, so nobody can touch you.

Right? And you can always let your kids know, Hey, if you see somebody coming up behind. Mommy or daddy, please let me know and they can tell you, mommy, some guy's running up from behind, so we can talk about that with our kids. I hope this episode gave you some practical ways to stay aware and feel more in control as you're out and about this season.

Remember, if something ever happens, it's not your fault. The responsibility is always on. The person who chose to harm you are not the blame. These tips are just here to help you feel more empowered, informed, and ready to protect your peace. You can download my safety checklist with all the key reminders we covered today at Women Aware and prepared.com/checklist, or if you want more tips, all the tips that I collected for myself when trying to stay safer when I had an abusive ex who was watching me closely.

I put together a toolkit of all the things that help me to stay safer and feel more empowered, and that can be found for you at Women Aware and prepared.com/toolkit. Go check it out. Thanks for tuning into the Aware and Prepared Podcast. Curious how tuned in your intuition really is. Take the free quiz at Aware and Prepared Life and get your score.

See how sharp your inner guide is. You are worthy of a safe and peaceful life. Talk with you next week and please share this episode with someone who came to mind. While you were listening, click on the top right menu in your podcast app. It might just be what they needed today.