Combating crime - small businesses take safety precautions - includes related articles on carrying guns, security equipment and crime insurance - Cover Story

Nation's Business, March, 1994 by Dale D. Buss

In Pittsburgh's inner city, health workers who make home visits warn one another via fax about outbreaks of violence on their routes.

Employees of a hair salon in Irving, Texas, armed themselves with pepper spray and other self-defense weapons after hearing an anti-crime consultant's advice about dealing with assailants.

Business owners in the crime-infested City Heights neighborhood of San Diego sparked a major controversy last year when they announced plans to plaster huge warnings on local billboards: "City Heights: Crime Capital of San Diego."

"We wanted to really wake up the neighborhood and say, 'Let's pull together and do something about our [crime] problems,'" says Dennis Presfield, owner of a local plumbing-supply company and a leader in devising a neighborhood crime-fighting strategy. "The billboard controversy got a lot of people focused," he adds, which in turn made it unnecessary to post the warnings.

After years of lurking in the shadows, crime has suddenly emerged as Public Worry No. 1. Following President Clinton's Jan. 25 State of the Union address, a CBS Television poll found that Americans ranked their biggest concerns as crime, 40 percent; health care, 33 percent; and the economy, 26 percent. A year ago, the No. 1 issue in most polls was the economy.

Overwhelming majorities in a USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll late last year favored more police, stiffer criminal sentences, and higher bail for those charged with committing violent crimes.

"The people of this country are fed up with crime," FBI Director Louis J. Freeh said at a National Press Club luncheon in Washington in December. "The media report it, statistics reflect it, polls prove it."

Just as quickly as crime shoves its way to the forefront of the nation's public worries, America is shoving back. Led in large part by rank-and-file owners of small and medium-sized businesses, citizens are making efforts to regain control of their shops, their streets, and their homes before crime and its consequences make constant prisoners of them all.

In a way, the timing of this grass-roots movement against crime is curious. After growing 41 percent through the 1980s, the number of violent crimes in 1992 rose by only 1.1 percent over the number for 1991, according to the latest figures released by FBI. Murders actually dropped by 3.8 percent. Experts cite demographics: The number of American males in the 16-to-25 age bracket--by far the most criminally active age group--is declining.

Nevertheless, fear of crime seems to be at an all-time high. Freeh attributes much of that to the spreading presence of higher-profile youth gangs. News-media fascination with sensationalistic crimes is another often-mentioned factor. And some experts cite the increasing intrusion of violence into the workplace.

An estimated 2.2 million Americans were physically attacked at work in 1992, an additional 6.3 million were threatened, and 16 million were harassed, according to a recent national survey sponsored by Northwestern National Life Insurance Co., of Minneapolis.

The survey also found that customers were twice as likely to commit acts of physical violence (44 percent of all attacks) as were strangers (24 percent) or co-workers (20 percent).

"We like to think that the workplace is safe and that hostile behavior is random and rare," says Peggy Lawless, the survey's project director. "The reality is that violence in America is spilling out of the back streets and into the workplace."

Homicide has become the third-most-prevalent cause of death in the U.S. workplace, after on-the-job automobile accidents and machinery-related accidents, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. The institute reports that violence took the lives of 730 people on the job nationwide in 1992.

In the New York City metropolitan area, 119 people were murdered at work in 1992, representing nearly half of all deaths on the job in the region--a far higher percentage than in any other urban area. Most of the homicide victims were taxi drivers or workers at small grocery stores, gasoline stations, or fast-food restaurants, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Not only does crime tear the nation's social fabric, it takes a huge toll on the economy. Estimates of the annual cost of crime are as high as $425 billion, including everything from the cost of imprisonment, to spending on private security, to income lost because of fear of crime. The potential impact of the fear factor is seen in the revenue loss by the Florida tourism industry following the murders of foreign tourists there last year.

The cost of treating a crime-related physical injury averages $41,000, and all the injury-causing crimes that occur in a year in this country ultimately cost $202 billion in medical fees, psychological costs, and productivity losses over the victims' lifetimes, says a new study by researchers from the University of California at San Francisco and the National Public Services Research Institute, in Landover, Md. It was the largest study ever conducted of the economic toll of crime on society.