So, my father was a security guard. Not only that, but he was chief of security at a major hotel. (Tch, one of the most successful hotel chains in the country and they paid their chief of security minimum wage.) And there were a lot of incidences at this hotel. It was near a boarding school that this last year got shut down for abuse, so in his time there were a lot of runaways, a lot of angry adults, teachers covering their asses, and so on. It was right on the border with Ohio, so you’d often have people who were in trouble in one state crossing over. It had a popular bar, so there were a lot of drunken violence. Occasionally a famous person with an addiction. Or just belligerent guests in general. A high school dance party gone wrong, baby boomers who didn’t get their wine fast enough, a couple that started having fun but ended the night in debauchery, etc. Sometimes there was some form of abuse going on in a room, and sadly it was a common occurrence for a woman to come in needing to hide from an abusive partner, at which point the security chief really needed to be on alert for if the partner came looking for her.
As much as I hate the guy, he was a pretty good security guard. He wore breakaway ties so he couldn’t be grabbed, he knew a bit of kuk sool won, he was trained in the use of firearms, pepper spray, and tear gas, plus he was a big, burly guy with a terrifying voice when he was mad. And he had good elocution and confidence. I think in the decade or so he was there, he only had to get the cops involved less than a handful of times, he was that good at keeping the peace.
Here’s the thing: He was never, ever, allowed to touch a patron. Not only would he have been fired if he had, but he would have been brought up on assault charges by the law. All that gun experience, all that gas training, all the martial arts? He wasn’t allowed to use them at all while on the job. He wasn’t even allowed to jab a finger into a guy’s chest to tell them to watch themselves, bud. He could not touch them. Even in a case of immediate harm or death of another patron, he was not to engage other than to get others to safety and to call the police. He could have saved someone’s life by punching out a knife-wielding asshole, and he would have been fired at the very least.
Naturally, being a big, intimidating guy worked in his favor, because most people didn’t want to fuck with him even if they didn’t normally consider a guy in a suit to be tough. He had the honeyed words to make a guy shit his pants, basically. Never once did he touch someone trying to start a fight, and still cops were rarely called. He could get people to calm down or to leave the premises without violence, without even touching them. And he got hit a few times, and he was still able to handle it would touching the other guy.
And yes, I get it. Air security is a different thing than building security. And if there had been a bomb or a gun or a knife, the narrative would be different. But there wasn’t. It was just one guy, unfairly singled out, frustrated with being unfairly singled out and missing his flight and wanting to go home. His only crime was being stubborn, and he had reason to be. He never made the first move. Hell, he could have even been physically violent towards the security and it never should have warranted the brutality of the response. It wasn’t proportional.
tl;dr Wild concept: it’s possible to defuse a potential situation without trying to kill or maim someone.
