http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/new_breed_of_bodyguard_for_a_fearful_city
A chin-strokey, unconvincingly hard-bitten feature from my days as city edtior of a community weekly; at the time I was reading a lot of Mike Davis and trying to find my way in my native Los Angeles, which had been rocked by riots and earthquakes in the seven years I’d been away. Story won a first place award for feature writing from the LA Press Club.
David Grossman sits behind the desk of his new office on Wilshire Boulevard, below an American flag and beside a 12-gauge shotgun. The beefy 35-year-old with a helmet of feathered hair is the managing director of the Alliance Group. Operations Manager and sidekick Thomas Rossetti stands at attention near the door. He wears a brown suit, dark sunglasses and a 9 mm Glock packed in a shoulder holster.
Their business is bodyguards. The banner outside reads “The Bodyguard Institute,” but Rossetti prefers another term: Personal Protection Specialist.
“When you think of the term bodyguard, you think of a wall with legs, someone with a lot of muscle and not a lot of intelligence,” says Grossman. “Nowadays, we do a lot more than we ever did. We use computers, we baby-sit kids, we blend in at expensive restaurants.”
Gone are the days, he says, when a bodyguard meant an oafish ex-cop in a bad suit hovering over a dainty starlet. The Alliance Group specializes in training a new breed of bodyguard for a new crop of customers.
Just as private security patrols have become commonplace in middle class neighborhoods, the Alliance Group hopes bodyguards become modern accessories for middle class urbanites. The majority of the agency’s new clients are people who have never used bodyguards before. It’s this emerging middle market that the Alliance Group hopes to corner, training students with little or no experience and offering agents for as little as $14 an hour.
Clients include women fearful of stalkers, mid-level professionals guarding corporate secrets and executives who feel vulnerable venturing into public spaces.
“We have people from two-income families in Encino,” says Rossetti. “Driving down Ventura Boulevard in a Mercedes, they’re now a target. We live in a very violent society.”
“Providing bodyguards to the masses is perhaps the inevitable next step in a rapidly expanding industry. Americans already spend $60 billion a year on private security, almost double the amount paid on police protection, says Patrician O’Donnell Grummett, a professor of criminology at Cal State Northridge. By the year 2000, money spent on private security is expected to triple the funding for police.
People are turning to private help in larger numbers, Grummett says, because of heightened sense of fear. “People have seen funding for police cut just as crime has gone up – they figure if police don’t have the resources to protect them, they’ll hire someone who does,” she says.
Grummett says the trend is troubling because private security is far less accountable than police; bodyguards are less restricted by rules of procedure and Constitutional rights of privacy or search and seizure laws. “At one time we feared a police state,” she says. “Instead we are moving toward a state of private security… We could easily find ourselves in a society in which anyone with means employs their own little private security force, each with its own set of rules.”
She paints a picture of housewives tailed through grocery stores by men with bulging holsters; school kids accompanied through cafeterias by men watching for perpetrators; the glow of candlelit dinners reflected in the mirrored sunglasses of Personal Protection Specialists.
“So much muscle for hire will lead to abuse of power,” says author Mike Davis, who chronicles the escalation of urban fear in his book City of Quartz. “You’ve got a huge number of hard body macho types out there with fantasies about becoming some sort of cop. They can’t get a job on the force and they don’t want to guard a supermarket parking lot. But they’re desperate for a legitimate reason to exert power and use a gun.”
But many of those who use bodyguards say they simply can no longer depend on police to keep them safe. Janine, a middle class professional who asked to remain anonymous, hired a bodyguard last December after being stalked by a former boyfriend. She moved from her home in Arizona to escape his continued advances. He somehow tracked her to California, where he showed up at her door, repeatedly called her office and left prank messages on her answering machine.
“I felt extremely uncomfortable,” she says. “I felt like I needed help and the police weren’t very helpful. They told me they couldn’t really do anything to stop him until something serious happened. And I couldn’t wait for that.”
A bodyguard from the Alliance Group accompanied her in public and remained in close contact for two weeks. The bodyguard eventually confronted the stalker. “I don’t know exactly what he said or did, but he made it clear that he would be dealt with if he continued to follow me,” she says.
The men behind the Alliance Group say people with much less obvious threats also need their protection. “We’re all vulnerable to threat,” says Rossetti. “Criminals out there are getting smarter. The value of life is getting cheaper. There are people out there who’ll shoot you in the head without blinking.”
But is the city really that treacherous? Police say no, arguing that such graphic warnings serve only to inflame urban fear and boost the bottom line of private security companies. “You’d think there’s a crime occurring on every corner every day if you listened to a lot of these sales pitches,” says Captain Robert Kurth, commanding officer of the Los Angeles Police Department’s West Los Angeles Division. “I know many private protection agencies make a living on the fears and anxieties of others. Those fears provide the basis for a flourishing business.”
In fact, Kurth says, Los Angeles is “the safest metropolitan center in America.” Such an assertion is a tough sell in a city still recovering from a major riot and constantly bombarded by reports of carjackings, muggings and high-profile murders. If private security can help people feel safer, Kurth says, a valuable job has been done.
“If they can reduce the level of fear, God bless them,” he says. “Right now they’re not.”
Appealing to urban anxiety may be too profitable a sales pitch to give up. Managers say since opening in January, the Alliance Group has broken profit records with each passing week. Four months after moving from a Westside office into a 6,000 square foot two-story building in the Miracle Mile, the owners are considering expanding into an adjacent storefront.
The group splits its operations between training and placement. An average of 30 applicants seek a spot in the school every day; some are active duty cops, says Rossetti, “sick of the politics and seeking better pay in the private sector.” Students train in martial arts, firearms and first aid. They also brush up on social skills and etiquette. When they complete their training, new bodyguards should be able to wield a canister of pepper spray as skillfully as they employ a salad fork. “It’s about blending in and using stealth,” says Grossman.
In the lobby, applicants flip through textbooks with titles including Keep ‘Em Alive! and Dead Clients Don’t Pay. They sit slack-jawed watching training videos picturing men ducking behind sedans while others pose purposefully against limousines. Lights from a pinball machine called Secret Service flash against the wall.
In a classroom near the back of the first floor, instructors go over progressive levels of protection. Basic training prepares a bodyguard to drive and escort a client. More advanced bodyguards complete martial arts training and acquire weapons permits. The top echelon, called “the mercenary level,” are those guards with a background in linguistics, explosives and all manner of firearms and combat.
More than half of applicants don’t make it through the training, Grossman says. “We’re not looking for gung ho macho types,” he says. “A lot of those guys leave after their first visit.”
The worse things get on the street, the better business gets for bodyguards. Calls picked up last summer when Nicole Simpson was murdered and again with the recent slaying of Tex-Mex star Selena. “People get soft and think everything is OK until something happens to someone big – be it John Lennon or Jody Foster or Jerry Dunphy,” Rossetti says. “We get a ripple effect every time.”
Along with fear, there is another factor at work in the expansion of the business, Davis says: status. “It’s like a flashy car or a personal trainer,” he says. “Some people are acting out extreme paranoia and others are hiring these guys to define their personal lifestyle.”
Some worry that the growth of private security is turning safety into a commodity. While women like Janine have undoubtedly benefited from personal attention, what about those for whom the cut-rate price of $14-an-hour is still prohibitive?
“If a woman without much money is being stalked, she just doesn’t have the same options at her fingertips,” says Grummett. “It could turn out that the middle and upper classes can buy some of that safety that the rest don’t have.”
The men in the bodyguard business are untroubled by such predictions. “This is a growth industry,” says Rossetti. “And it’s not just in L.A. It’s not just an American phenomenon. It’s global.”
Will bodyguards become as common in the next century as gardeners, secretaries or doormen? Davis says advances in technological surveillance – what he calls “electronic guardian angels” – will stop the bodyguard boom before it really explodes. “The emerging pattern is to substitute technology for manpower,” says Davis. “There’s a whole generation of technology about to break through. You’ll carry around something that will monitor you in your car, while you’re jogging or wherever. This bodyguard business is transitional… but it is pretty surreal.”