From March 2008 Equipped with cell phones and binoculars, they were prepared to notify law enforcement if they spotted the snipers. (Ten people were killed and three others critically injured in those attacks; the perpetrators, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, were apprehended after police received an alert from a truck driver.)

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According to Rogers, a growing number of mall operators and retailers are taking note of how Israeli retail security forces deal with incidents of mass violence. “When a marketplace in Israel gets bombed,” he says, “the job of the retailers involved is to reopen that marketplace as quickly as they possibly can. And they do that, not just to be back in business, but also to get in the face of the faction that sent the bomber in.”

Danger from without
While it may seem as if the number of violent mass attacks in the United States is growing, they still account for a relatively small percentage of the violence committed in the workplace. Retail security consultant Rosemary J. Erickson, president of Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Athena Research, notes that 75 percent of all assaults in workplace environments are executed by outside parties, usually criminals.

The second-most frequent type of violence, occurring in approximately 15 percent of all workplace incidents, results from clients or customers angered by the type of service they feel they have received. Situations tied to individuals with an employment-related involvement or who have personal disagreements with someone who works in the retail environment each account for 5 percent of all workplace incidents.

More retailers today “are encouraging their employees to alert them to domestic situations that might lead to violence in the workplace,” Erickson says. “In some instances, employers will transfer those employees to other stores or they will encourage and support them to get restraining orders which makes it easier for the police to be called if a domestic partner becomes abusive in the workplace.”

Rogers adds that retailers have “an obligation” to employees who are vulnerable to workplace domestic violence “to make sure that there are measurable protective steps taken.”

Still, should an armed robber or assailant enter a store, retail security experts are in complete accord that employees should do nothing to put themselves or their customers at risk. Sales floor employees should “treat criminals like customers,” Lenard says. “You give them what they want and you get them out of the store fast. There is nothing more valuable than the safety of the employees and the customers.”

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