Keeping a Wary Eye Out : Crime: Although demand is up for security guards, their pay remains low and the risks are high. Four have been slain in O.C. over the past 14 months.

It was 1:30 Sunday morning, and the last movie had ended 45 minutes earlier. The white van in the parking lot of Century Cinedome Theatres caught the eye of Doug Kantner, a security guard who instinctively knew someone was inside.

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Grabbing his baton and flashlight, the 28-year-old guard jumped out of his patrol car, thumped on the van’s fender and peered in the windows. A sleeping man awoke with a jolt and swore. With a smile, Kantner calmed the man down and called for police, who decided he was too drunk to drive and sent him home in a taxi.

Throughout the encounter, Kantner was wary. “You never know when something will escalate,” he said.

This wisdom has been underscored repeatedly in the last 14 months, during which time four Orange County security guards have been murdered at their posts.

Last weekend, as Kantner spent the moonlit hours driving the streets of Orange, Tustin and Santa Ana, checking the shadows of parking lots and the unlit recessed doorways of office buildings for prowlers and vagrants, he wore a black band across the badge on his chest.

This “mourning badge,” he said, was to honor a 63-year-old guard who had been stabbed to death the night of April 19 at a palm tree-bordered office complex in Orange. Only days before, armored services employee Robert T. Walsh was found slain in his company car after servicing an ATM machine at a Wells Fargo Bank in the same city. On Wednesday morning, Kantner joined a phalanx of guards who stood solemnly in dark blue uniforms at a theater in Orange to remember Dagoberto Cerrero, a 23-year-old guard and former Marine, who died in a barrage of gunfire there Feb. 20, 1994. They watched as a Roman Catholic priest--using holy water sent by Cerrero’s mother in Puerto Rico--blessed the spot where police say the guard was murdered by a 19-year-old moviegoer.

The very day Cerrero died, yet another guard was killed in the parking lot of a bar in Garden Grove.

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Bill L. Bancroft, owner of Patrol One, the Orange-based security company where Kantner works, said this recent rash of killings shows that in Orange County the security business is becoming more dangerous, even as demand is increasing for guards to protect life and property in places ranging from upscale gated neighborhoods and construction sites to office buildings and shopping malls.

“The job has become more difficult in the sense that now any person you talk to is potentially a threat. . . . Now, anybody sitting in the shadows in a car is potentially a bad guy,” he said.

Nationally, being a security guard has always been a high-risk occupation. Data collected by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and the U.S. Department of Labor shows that between 1980 and 1993 there were 3.6 homicides for every 100,000 security guards employed, making security one of the nation’s five most perilous jobs.

Risk is intrinsic to the role of the security guard, who is expected to serve as a scarecrow to ward off criminals, ranging from vandals to burglars and car thieves, simply by being a visible sign of authority.

Yet guard pay is rock bottom, starting at $6 an hour or less, and few companies offer benefits. The turnover rate is extremely high, and the field tends to attract the young, the retired and the unskilled who live from paycheck to paycheck.

“The hope is their physical presence, the uniform, will frighten the criminal element to someplace else that doesn’t have security,” Bancroft said.

But critics contend that California’s 145,000 security guards would be less vulnerable if they were better screened, paid, trained, equipped and, in some circumstances, armed with guns to protect themselves.

Despite a recent trend to arm security guards, the vast majority remain unarmed, reflecting the high cost of insuring armed guard companies and the fears of many--customers and owners of stores, office buildings and apartment complexes--that the innocent might be caught in cross-fire.

Reckless use of guns by security guards prompted state legislation calling for upgraded training of armed guards.

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Not only have many security guards proved unskilled marksmen, but they have also exceeded the limits of their authority to shoot, which is to defend their lives or the lives of others, state officials said.

“You have had a lot of people being armed who didn’t know what they were doing, and so there was a real public safety threat,” said Irwin Nowick, senior consultant for the state Senate Rules Committee, which has been working on the issue.

To get a job as a security guard, applicants need only pass an open-book test and a fingerprint screen by the California Department of Justice. They are then issued a state “guard card.”

Although some companies run applicants through psychological and drug tests and background checks, others put newcomers on the job immediately, before the state has completed its criminal investigation, which can take four months or longer. They may or may not receive basic training or instruction on how to handle their assignment, authorities said.

“Most officers are just given their shields and uniform and told where to report. . . . They are lucky if they ever see a supervisor,” said Mark Gleckman, a member of the Workplace Violence Advisory Committee for the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

As a patrol supervisor, Kantner said, he earns more than most guards: $30,000 a year, without benefits. To achieve that salary, he said, he works 50 hours a week.

Unlike lesser-paid guards, Kantner has been able to buy personal protection, including a bulletproof vest, a baton and Mace. One of his most effective weapons, he said, is a high-beam flashlight that can blind an approaching criminal to the fact there is no gun holstered at his waist.

Kantner, a former shipping manager, said he landed in the security field after his former employer, National Lumber, went out of business.

On his locker a sign says “Captain Lucky,” a gift from his colleagues for having worked six years as a security guard and made 63 citizen arrests without being hurt. When he reads about security guards getting killed, Kantner said he tries to believe they made mistakes he would avoid. But he also remembers that a guard whose abilities he admired had a close call last May. That guard, who also worked for Patrol One, tried to disperse someone who seemed to be a common panhandler, but who police contend was actually preparing to rob a Vons supermarket.

The “panhandler” pulled out a gun and fired it repeatedly, one round catching the guard in the shoulder, and other shots narrowly missing a second guard in a nearby car.

“It could have been me. It happened on my night off,” said Kantner, who believes the guards could have protected themselves if they had been armed.

Kantner hopes someday to join the Los Angeles Police Department. Security guards, he complains, “don’t get the respect they deserve.”

“I have been called rent-a-cop, rent-a-pig and worse,” he said. Security guards take more abuse than police from the public, he contends. “They yell at you and know you can’t write them a ticket for it or take them to jail.”

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On- The- Job Deaths In 1993, work- related murders in California had decidedly white- collar look. About half the 196 victims were in sales or managerial / professional positions: Sales: 37% All other: 11% Administrative: 5% Managers / professionals: 14% Taxi drivers / transportation workers: 13% Security guards: 9% Manufacturing and repair: 11% *

Security Growth The number of security guards statewide and the number permitted to carry firearms have risen during the past two years. *

Officers ‘95*: 145,217 *

Firearms Permits ‘95*: 20,778 * As of February Sources: California Department of Consumer Affairs; Department of Industrial Relations, Division of Labor Statistics and Research; Researched by APRIL JACKSON / Los Angeles Times