Insecurity Guards

Many years ago, I worked nights at a very large hotel while going to college in the day.  As far as I can remember, I gave up sleeping.  In any case, I was a security guard for the hotel and my job was to guard the alley behind the hotel.  I did this job so well, that even now, decades after the hotel has been torn down, that alley is still there.

 

For whatever reason, I was issued a blue sport coat as well as a small pistol of the sort that would normally be found almost exclusively either cowering in a lady’s handbag or equipping the French Army.  As the coat was too heavy for Houston’s swamp-like summers and far too thin for the winter, I seldom wore it unless I was called to come inside the hotel for a problem that couldn’t be handled by the two inside security guards—something that rarely happened.  Since the rear of the hotel was completely fenced and my guard shack was both air conditioned in the summer and heated in the winter—the tiny little automatic stayed safely inside my desk.

 

Even though I was not exactly Rambo, I was still an armed security guard also equipped with an anemic flashlight and a walkie-talkie that occasionally worked.  I relate all of this so as to establish my bona fides: clearly, I am an expert on all matters involving armed security. 

 

Lately, there is a general trend to disarm security guards, that is accompanied by demands to de-fund and even replace the police, apparently attempting to move to less threatening forms of…. well, I don’t know what to call them.  Walmart greeters?  Insecurity Guards?  I’ve noticed, however, that the politicians calling for these changes have not given up their own protection.  In fact, in many cases—such as that of the city council in Minneapolis—they have increased the size of their personal security details.

 

Just yesterday, I was at the local grocery store and spotted the “security guard”, but it would have been hard to miss him:  the back of his shirt proclaimed “SECURITY” in large letters and he had a Sam Browne belt that rivaled Batman’s for pouches and attached gadgets—none of which was more dangerous than a fly swatter. 

 

To me, this is incredible foolishness:  if you are a security guard, the last thing you want people to think is that you are carrying a gun when you aren’t—that’s how people get shot.  In the unlikely event that anyone ever hires me to be a security guard again, I either want to look like I’m ready to take on an alien invasion, or (if I’m unarmed) I want to look like the Easter Bunny.

I prefer the former, because ‘Unarmed security guard’ is an oxymoron.  To be effective, security guards and police need to be highly trained, properly armed, and carefully supervised.  Unfortunately, I have a horrifically grim experience that emphasizes just this point.  It’s been forty-five years, but unfortunately, it’s impossible to forget the details.

 

Back in 1975, while The Doc was in medical school, the campus was located adjacent to the San Antonio Veteran’s Hospital, where there was a similar moronic movement to disarm the security guards.  The hospital administration believed that the sight of a security guard’s sidearm might prove distressful for veterans suffering from PTSD.  That the hospital was named "The Audie L. Murphy Memorial VA Hospital" and was thus decorated with a twice-life-size statue of Audie carrying both a Colt .45 and a Garand rifle (located directly in front of the hospital), and that the hospital lobby had a museum that featured several weapons (including a Thompson SMG and a Browning .30 MG) were evidently irrelevant. The security guards were disarmed and given golf carts to patrol the parking lot.

Almost immediately, Peggy Moran, a 27-year-old nurse, was assaulted in the parking lot and abducted at knifepoint.  Though she was in full view of a security guard and several other people, no one could stop the assault. All they were able to do was copy down the license plate as the assailant escaped with his hostage.

 

Within hours, Donald Gene Franklin, who was already on parole for a previous rape, was arrested at his apartment in possession of the nurse’s bloody clothing, but he cruelly refused to reveal the whereabouts of the nurse.  The city quickly organized a massive search effort that scoured the Texas hill country and the city for days, in vain.  I was among the multitude of people who volunteered to search for the missing woman.

 

After five days, Peggy was found nude, with a collapsed lung, suffering from seven severe stab wounds, and having lost more than half of her blood.  Though she lived long enough to tell the ambulance crew that she did not want to be taken to the hospital where she worked, she died within hours of being rescued.  She had endured five days of July heat in a Texas field and among her injuries were wounds inflicted by small animals and insects.

 

Shortly afterward, the hospital security guards went back to carrying guns.  A close friend, an emergency room physician, once told me that the administrative price of a stop sign at a busy intersection was one dead child.  The parking lot that my wife crossed daily going to and from her classrooms was guarded by armed security guards purchased with one dead nurse.

 

After arraignment, Franklin was put in solitary while awaiting the first of several trials.  After being visited by a famous Baptist preacher, Franklin announced his religious conversion and pleaded with jail authorities to be returned to the general prison population so he could share his newfound religious conversion.   When he was moved from solitary confinement, he almost immediately severely beat and raped a fellow prisoner.

 

After numerous court cases and an appeal that made it all the way the U.S. Supreme court, Franklin was executed by lethal injection in 1988 after a last meal of a hamburger and French fries.  To the end, he refused to make a statement about Peggy Moran.

 

There are monsters among us who do not respond to the best efforts of social workers and kind-hearted people.  FBI statistics indicate that, as a general rule of thumb, for every thousand police officers in a metropolitan area, the murder rate drops by one.  This current popular trend of defunding the police will, of course, result in an increased crime rate, that in due course, will trigger a political consensus that once again the nation needs “to get tough on crime”, and once again police departments will slowly expand.

 

In the meantime, I wonder whose lives will pay for this experiment.