THE TIMES POLL : Most in State Feel Free of Violence on Job, Poll Says : Crime: Despite recent attacks, most feel safer in workplace than in own neighborhood.

Despite recent outbreaks of bloody violence in the workplace that have drawn widespread attention, more than four out of every five Californians generally feel safe on the job, according to a Los Angeles Times Poll.

In addition, the poll shows that slightly more Californians feel safe at work than they do in their own neighborhoods.

The poll, taken between March 26 and March 29, found that 83% of the employed Californians surveyed feel either very or somewhat safe at their work site or at the places they must visit while on the job. Another 11% consider their work situations “somewhat unsafe,” while 5% say they are “very unsafe” on the job and 1% say they are “not sure.”

The trend in the figures was consistent among different demographic groups: Men as well as women, and Anglos as well as blacks and Latinos, all reported generally feeling safe in the workplace.

Still, Californians expressed significant concerns about crime. Susan Pinkus, assistant director of the Times Poll, explained that people generally feel safe when they look at their own workplaces and neighborhoods. “But when they look at the bigger picture, and they look at the (entire) community, they feel there’s a problem,” she said.

For instance, 75% of all Californians polled--including people both in and outside the labor force--feel very or somewhat safe in their own neighborhoods, but 55% believe that people living in their communities face a serious crime problem. In addition, crime was rated nearly neck-in-neck with the economy as the most important problem currently facing the state.

Likewise, only 22% of employed Californians responded that there is no type of crime that they fear at work.

The most commonly cited type of crime feared at work was robbery, with 27% of employed Californians rating it as a concern on the job. Next came assault, at 18%, and random violence, at 16%.

Only 2% said they feared being murdered at work.

Nevertheless, many experts consider workplace homicide a growing problem. Last fall, the U.S. Labor Department issued its first major study on the topic and reported that homicides accounted for 1,004 work-related deaths in 1992.

In addition, the report said homicide was by far the leading cause of on-the-job fatalities for women and, including men and women, it ranked a close second to highway accidents as the most deadly workplace hazard.

The responses to the Times Poll’s workplace crime questions came from 997 employed Californians. The margin of sampling error among that group is plus or minus four percentage points.

The employed people polled by The Times were part of an overall survey sample of 1,608 Californians. For the full sample, the margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.

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