There is an impeccably logical way to deal with workplace violence: wait until somebody becomes violent.
At that point, the problem is wonderfully unambiguous. Security can respond. An incident can be logged. CCTV can be reviewed. Management can investigate. Reports can be written. And, depending on what happened, police, insurers, HR teams and lawyers can all become involved.
The slight drawback is that the violence has already happened.
That contradiction is increasingly finding its way into the US security conversation, particularly in healthcare and retail, where organisations are questioning whether too much attention and spending remains focused on managing incidents after they occur rather than identifying risk earlier.
At the Security Industry Association’s Health Care Security Symposium on 14 October, security leaders repeatedly returned to the same theme:
| healthcare security can no longer operate primarily as a reactive function.
Mark Moore, chief security officer at Dayton Children’s Hospital, cited industry research showing that hospitals spend millions of dollars dealing with the consequences of workplace violence, while less than 20% of that spending is directed towards prevention.
His challenge to the sector was straightforward: security leaders need to make a stronger case for investment before incidents happen, not simply demonstrate their value afterwards.
The urgency is understandable.
Research highlighted this year by Security Magazine, drawing on a National Nurses United survey, found that 84.8% of nurses reported experiencing some form of workplace violence during the previous year.
| More than 70% reported verbal assault, while a third said they had been slapped, kicked or punched. Only 35.5% said staff were always available to respond when violence occurred.
Hospitals also face an unusually difficult security problem.
A bank can make itself look secure. So can a warehouse. A hospital, rather inconveniently, is supposed to look welcoming.
Patients need access. Families arrive under stress. Emergency departments cannot simply shut their doors when somebody behaves unpredictably. Healthcare workers routinely interact with people experiencing pain, trauma, mental-health crises or heightened emotions.
As Eric Sean Clay, vice president and chief security officer at FMOL Health, told the SIA symposium,
| patients should feel cared for when entering a hospital rather than intimidated by the security around them.
According to SIA’s account of the event, leading healthcare organisations are consequently looking more closely at analytics, video, access control and situational-awareness systems to identify potential concerns earlier. But speakers were equally clear that technology alone is not the answer.
The National Retail Federation’s Impact of Retail Theft & Violence 2026 report found some encouraging signs in traditional theft.
Among the retailers surveyed, shoplifting incidents fell by an average of 12.4% between 2024 and 2025, while merchandise theft incidents declined by 8.1%.
One might reasonably conclude that everyone could relax slightly. Unfortunately, crime rarely has the courtesy to remain in the category in which researchers originally filed it.
Retailers reported increasing repeat-offender activity, organised retail crime and other forms of external fraud, while violence and disruptive behaviour remained a significant concern.
The response is revealing.
| 72% of surveyed retailers are investing in management training for workplace violence prevention, 65% in employee training and 61% in risk-intelligence technology.
The survey covered 66 retail companies representing 143 brands and approximately $1.7 trillion in annual sales, giving the findings considerably more weight than an isolated security-industry poll.
What is happening in retail therefore looks less like a simple reaction to worsening crime statistics and more like a change in how risk itself is being understood.
There is, of course, a slightly awkward commercial problem with successful prevention.
Nothing happens.
An organisation can count assaults. It can count police callouts, injuries, insurance claims and days lost through absence.
It is considerably harder to count an assault that never occurred.
That inevitably makes preventative spending more difficult to demonstrate than investments designed to respond to visible incidents.
Moore’s observation that less than 20% of healthcare workplace-violence spending is focused on prevention therefore exposes a wider issue for security leaders.
Reactive security produces evidence of its own necessity. A serious incident creates an obvious reason to spend money.
Prevention asks organisations to spend money precisely so that the evidence never arrives.
Yet the direction of travel across both healthcare and retail suggests more organisations are beginning to accept that argument.
For years, the most visible sign of an effective security operation has often been what happens when something goes wrong.
Increasingly, the US security industry appears to be asking a less visible question.
What happened before it did?
