There is a comfortable way to imagine workplace violence: as something that happens somewhere else, to someone else, after enough warning for everyone to get ready.
That version fits nicely into a budget meeting.
Actual violence doesn’t attend budget meetings.
On December 4, 2023, Eric Harrison was fatally stabbed while working security at Macy’s in Center City Philadelphia. He was 27. According to reporting based on police accounts, a man confronted over an attempted theft left the store, returned, and attacked Harrison and another guard. Both guards were unarmed. The Philadelphia Inquirer
Harrison’s death should force an uncomfortable question into every conversation about security procurement: What, exactly, are you expecting the person in the uniform to do when the danger becomes real?
Because if the answer involves confronting violent people, protecting employees from an attack, or standing between a weapon and a customer, the next question gets harder.
What have you actually given that person to work with?
A radio matters. Training matters. A clear exit matters. But a shirt with SECURITY printed across the back does not change what a knife can do to a human body.
And a company’s preference for an unarmed workforce does not bind the person coming through the door.
The employee carries the consequences
After Harrison’s death, his parents, Dawn Fobbs and Eric Coates, pursued civil action. December 2024 reporting described allegations that Macy’s had failed to provide adequate protection despite employee concerns. The family’s attorney said requests for stab-resistant jackets had been met with the response that “nobody has been stabbed yet.” Macy’s expressed heartbreak over the tragedy and declined further comment because of the litigation. These are allegations, not established findings of liability. 6abc
Macy’s had unarmed security. It still faced a lawsuit alleging it failed to protect the people providing that security. That alone punctures the comforting assumption that choosing unarmed guards makes the liability problem disappear. Businesses must account for the danger their security personnel face—and whether those personnel have the training, equipment, and support to face it.
Harrison was a Macy’s employee. For businesses employing guards directly or buying contracted protection, the underlying management question remains: does the security arrangement actually address the danger?
The reasoning described in the equipment allegation deserves scrutiny well beyond one department store.
If an employer waits for a stabbing before seriously considering protection against stabbing, the first injured worker becomes the evidence required to justify the purchase.
Think about what that means.
The hazard can be discussed. The equipment can be requested. The people exposed to the danger can raise their concerns. Yet the threshold for action remains a human being getting hurt.
That is an appalling standard for prevention.
No serious safety program should need a memorial before it can justify preparation.
Whatever a court determines about this case, the question it raises is legitimate: Are workers being equipped according to the danger they face, or according to the version of the workplace management would prefer to imagine?
Unarmed does not mean harmless
The appeal of unarmed security is easy to understand. A firearm introduces serious responsibilities. People worry about accidental discharge, poor judgment, escalation, and harm to bystanders. Those concerns deserve serious answers.
But removing a firearm from the assignment does not remove violence from the premises.
It changes the guard’s available options.
That distinction gets lost when “unarmed” becomes shorthand for “safe.” Safe for whom? Under what conditions? Against which threat?
An unarmed employee can still be punched, stabbed, cornered, or targeted after an earlier confrontation. A guard can follow instructions and still encounter someone who has no interest in following them.
None of this makes the guard incompetent. It makes the assignment consequential.
The strongest criticism of unarmed security belongs at the management level: the decision to place a person into a foreseeable confrontation while limiting that person’s ability to respond.
There are legitimate observation and access-control roles where an unarmed assignment fits the assessed risk. But that does not justify treating unarmed staffing as the default answer for a location where employees are expected to manage aggression or intervene in dangerous encounters.
The job description needs to survive contact with the actual job.
“Observe and report” needs an honest explanation
Observation and reporting are valuable security functions. Early detection can prevent an emergency. A prompt call can bring help. Accurate information can make the response more effective.
But businesses need to be honest about what they are buying.
If a guard’s assignment is to observe, withdraw, and call police, employees should understand that. Customers should not be encouraged to assume the uniform guarantees immediate physical protection. Managers should not quietly expect intervention while publicly describing the assignment as observation.
Imagine the contradiction: a worker is told to avoid confrontation, then judged on whether thefts stop, trespassers leave, and disruptive people comply.
That creates pressure to do more than the assignment safely supports.
The phrase “observe and report” cannot settle the practical question of what happens when somebody attacks the observer.
A radio can summon assistance. It cannot make assistance arrive before every injury.
Responsible security planning has to account for the interval between recognizing a threat and receiving outside help. That interval belongs to the people already on the scene.
A theft’s price tag does not measure its danger
The value of merchandise tells you what the merchandise costs. It tells you very little about how a person will react when confronted.
A low-dollar incident can become a high-consequence encounter.
That does not justify using deadly force over property. It should push employers toward the opposite priority: protecting human life, limiting unnecessary confrontation, and preparing for the possibility that a person becomes violent.
Recovering merchandise and surviving an assault are different objectives. A competent security program must keep them distinct.
Businesses should also stop treating the end of an initial encounter as automatic proof that the danger has passed. The reported sequence in Harrison’s case involved an individual leaving and returning. That sequence raises questions about communication, reentry, staff warnings, and what happens after an apparently resolved confrontation.
Those are planning questions. They need answers before the next encounter.
Putting a gun on a poorly prepared guard is another failure
A credible argument for armed security has to demand more than a firearm.
Hiring an inadequately prepared person, handing them a weapon, and calling the result protection is reckless. The equipment cannot supply judgment the organization never selected for, trained, or evaluated.
An armed officer needs the discipline to disengage, communicate, recognize limits, and avoid turning a manageable situation into a catastrophe.
Training should test decisions under pressure. It should examine whether the officer recognizes when intervention is unnecessary, when withdrawal is appropriate, and when bystanders make an action unsafe. Competence also includes emergency communication, medical response, and accurate reporting afterward.
Marksmanship alone cannot answer those questions.
Neither can a certificate sitting in a personnel file.
The case for professional armed security becomes stronger when it demands rigorous selection, recurring practice, meaningful supervision, and accountability. It becomes weaker whenever someone treats carrying a firearm as the entire qualification.
A weapon expands capability. It also expands responsibility.
Both have to be funded.
Prevention requires an entire system
The gun debate can swallow the rest of the security conversation. That is a mistake.
Protective equipment, staffing, physical layout, emergency procedures, communication, and management responsiveness all matter. OSHA’s workplace-violence guidance emphasizes assessing the worksite and combining prevention programs with engineering controls, administrative controls, and training. It does not present a firearm as a substitute for those measures. OSHA
A capable armed officer should operate inside that system.
Employees need a reliable way to report threats. Supervisors need a process for acting on those reports. Equipment needs to match the identified hazards. Assignments need realistic limits. Repeated incidents need to produce changes, not merely additional paperwork.
The people working the floor should have a voice in that process.
When a guard says an assignment feels unsafe, management has received information. The response should be investigation and action appropriate to the findings.
A safety program that hears warnings but never changes is just an archive.
The liability argument needs to include failure to protect
It is reasonable to worry about what an armed officer might do wrong.
It is equally reasonable to examine what an inadequately equipped security operation may be unable to do at all.
A meaningful assessment must consider both. Removing one category of risk does not establish that the entire operation has become safer.
Nor does Harrison’s death prove that a firearm would have saved him. Nobody can honestly reconstruct that alternative outcome with certainty. The case also does not establish that armed security produces lower liability at every property.
What it does expose is the weakness of assuming that an unarmed assignment is inherently the responsible choice.
Responsibility requires examining the threat, the mission, the equipment, and the people expected to carry it out.
The worker deserves more than a reassuring label on an unsafe arrangement.
Why Privateer refuses the unarmed model
Privateer Security does not offer unarmed security.
That position reflects a specific operating belief: for the protective assignments Privateer accepts, the most responsible approach is to rigorously train armed officers and hold them to demanding standards of judgment, restraint, and accountability.
Privateer’s published academy description includes simulator-based practice involving communication, de-escalation, intermediate force, firearms, and combined medical emergencies. The purpose of that breadth is to prepare officers to make decisions across a developing incident, rather than treating every problem as a shooting problem. Privateer Academy
Privateer’s position is that liability is best reduced by building a capable, disciplined security operation: careful selection, rigorous training, appropriate equipment, clear expectations, and sustained oversight. Its armed-only model follows that philosophy. It is an approach to managing risk, not a promise that a firearm eliminates it.
A business asking someone to stand between its people and danger should be prepared to invest in that person’s ability to survive the assignment.
The uniform makes the responsibility visible.
The training and equipment have to make it real.