You Can’t Undo Violence: Why I Help Small Employers Prevent It

You can't undo violence. Once it happens, there's no taking it back. The only thing you've really got is prevention.

I learned that over 30 years building cases as an investigator. But I learned it before that, too.

When I was eight years old, I was mugged on Halloween for the money I was collecting for Unicef while trick-or-treating. And my father's sister was the victim of a high-profile violent criminal. In my family, violence wasn't something that only happened to other people. It was personal.

In June of 1980, right after high school, I spent a couple of weeks interviewing survivors of Nazi labor camps for my dad's law firm. At 18, I listened as they described the worst of man's inhumanity to man. 

That's when I first understood that violence doesn't end when the act is over. People carry it with them for the rest of their lives.

During the 30 years that I worked as an investigator, I saw the trauma violence causes up close. Closer than most people ever will. Quadruple homicides. Sexual assaults. Shootings. Beatings.

Attorneys sent me to interview people whose loved ones had been killed, sometimes by the very person we represented. They sent me because I understood what those families were going through and could sit with them through it. 

Those interviews were necessary for the work. They were always heart-wrenching too.

One case has stayed with me more than most, and I've written about it before. A young teenager, full of life with a great future ahead of her, was murdered by a custodian at a business she was visiting. 

Her killing didn't come out of nowhere. It came out of ordinary decisions the business owners made: who got hired, how they were supervised, and who was scheduled to work when. 

Those are the same kinds of decisions small business owners make every week, usually with no one double-checking them. I tell her full story in my book, Is Your Workplace Actually Safe?.

Doing that work is how I mastered the skills I use today to help small California employers put a workplace violence prevention program in place that protects their employees and their organization. 

But the violence and its aftermath taught me much more than skills. It taught me what people go through when violence hits. And it taught me that once the harm is done, there’s nothing that can make the person targeted by the violence whole.

That's why I don't do fill-in-the-blank, boilerplate prevention plans. They may look good on paper, but they don't reduce the risk of violence or the harm it causes to your people and your organization. 

The damage workplace violence causes isn't theoretical, so your approach to preventing it shouldn't be either. Effective prevention has to be grounded in how violence actually happens.

I started doing violence prevention work for my attorney clients when their firms came under threat because of the cases they worked on. That led to working with judges, court administrators, and court employees. They had court security provided by law enforcement. But they regularly dealt with violent people, and they didn't want to leave their safety, or their families' safety, to chance.

Later, I trained the staff of a U.S. Senator on strategies to avoid physical harm. They'd already been trained by the Capitol Police. But that training didn't address what happened when work-related threats spilled over into their private lives, and with violent threats against public officials becoming normal, that's exactly what they faced.

Today I focus on helping small employers. 

You don't have an HR department, a safety team, or security staff to handle workplace violence prevention. That responsibility lands on your shoulders, and they're already carrying a lot.

For a small employer, one incident can set off a chain reaction. Cal/OSHA fines that run from about $16,000 to more than $160,000 per violation. A lawsuit from an injured customer that can reach $250,000 to a million dollars or more. Good employees who quit. Customers who stop coming in. 

For a lot of small businesses, that's the end of the line.

All of it, from the survivors I sat with at 18, to the families I interviewed, to that young girl's story, comes down to one thing for me. I want small employers to have a workplace violence prevention plan that actually protects their people and their business, not one that just looks good on paper.

If you've ever wondered whether your plan would hold up when it really counted, my book is the place to start. It's coming out soon. If you'd like to know the moment it's available, sign up here.