It’s not easy — nor is it cheap — for businesses to keep their customers safe these days.
As Americans are witnessing an ever-growing list of deadly mass shootings by “lone-wolf” attackers within U.S. borders, businesses that attract large groups of people, like malls and theme parks, are pouring money into security measures they hope will keep their patrons out of harm’s way.
The country is still reeling from the most recent attack of this kind by a shooter who killed 50 people and injured 53 others at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Before that were the 2015 San Bernardino shooting that ended with 16 dead and 21 injured and the 2012 movie theater shooting that left 12 dead and 58 injured in Aurora, Colorado.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the amusement park industry already spends about $250 million annually on security, but that number is expected to skyrocket by more than $100 million over the next few years.
After the June 12 shooting in Orlando, home to Disney World, the Walt Disney Co. hiked its security efforts, Reuters reports.
“Unfortunately we’ve all been living in a world of uncertainty, and during this time we have increased our security measures across our properties, adding such visible safeguards as magnetometers, additional canine units, and law enforcement officers on site, as well as less visible systems that employ state-of-the-art security technologies,” Disney spokeswoman Jacquee Wahler said in an email statement to Reuters.
Last December, Universal Studios Hollywood, SeaWorld and Disneyland installed metal detectors outside their entry gates.
The rising price of security
The LAT said businesses are being forced to shoulder a heavy burden as they attempt the difficult task of identifying and thwarting attacks by lone actors:
American companies were already spending about $341 billion on security in 2014, more than three times as much as they did in 1990, after adjusting for inflation, according to ASIS International, a professional group for security personnel. The group said that since 2013, companies have been spending about 10 percent more on security each year.
Closed-circuit cameras alone have become an $8 billion industry, about 17 times larger than it was two decades ago.
When you consider that nearly half of the active-shooter incidents that have occurred since 2000, in which a gunman is trying to kill people in a confined, populated area, have happened at a place of business, it makes sense that businesses are pouring more money into security, which varies from armed guards to bomb-sniffing dogs to video camera surveillance.