Security Issues Raised Amid Malls’ Proliferation

Jim Flessas’ bulk strains against blue as he trudges through the tiny suburban mall.

He’s 76, and retired. But for $6.50 an hour, more than 50 hours a week, he puts on a blue uniform and monitors the Nashua Mall and Plaza.

He works as a security guard, keeping the mall free of young hooligans and helping shoppers find their cars. His training? Years at the wheel of a taxi.

Some complain that Flessas is typical of mall cops: undertrained, underpaid, overworked.

Now that Mall America has replaced Main Street America, security guards, not police, often are shoppers’ first line of defense against crime.

Are they up to the task?

Most malls “have Grandpa who is kind of between retirement and the nursing home,” said Howard Levinson, president of Howard Services, a security company in Franklin, Mass. “Or they have a kid who wants to get into law enforcement. Maybe he’s smart enough to do a good job, or stupid enough to act like a cop.”

Either way, many are not prepared to tackle crime at today’s mall.

The malling of America has been intense. There were more than 28,000 shopping centers nationwide in 1986, according to the National Research Bureau in Chicago. By 1997, that number jumped to nearly 43,000.

In a typical month, 187 million adults visit shopping centers around the country, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers in New York.

As malls replaced the traditional town center, becoming as much places to socialize as to shop, crime also shifted--with thieves, and worse, moving inside. But no national statistics record shopping center crime, and few mall managers will discuss security issues.

“The publicity and the public relations are huge,” Levinson said. “How many women are going to want to go to a mall [by] themselves if there’s been an attack?”

There also are no firm numbers on how many mall cops patrol U.S. shopping centers, even though mall security, like mall marketing, is big business.

William Cunningham, vice president of Hallcrest, a security consulting company in Amelia Island, Fla., estimates that shopping security cost $98 billion last year.

Despite their growing role in keeping shoppers safe, mall cops take a beating in the public eye. Teenagers make fun of them, and Hollywood has not been kind.

Hit cult movies such as “Mallrats” play on the lore of teenagers harassed by overzealous and dimwitted guards.

Mark Francis, a 24-year-old security guard at Pheasant Lane Mall in Nashua, spends as much time fighting stereotypes as he does petty crime.

“Every time a security guard is in a movie, they are either an idiot or get killed,” said Levinson, a former security guard. “They’re never a hero.”

As a result, he said, teenagers don’t take the guards seriously, making their jobs harder and, perhaps, malls less safe.

Tom Mills, operations manager at Howard Services, said mall cops may deserve those shoddy reputations.

“In general, they’re too young, and they’re more interested in being friendly with the cute girls who work at the mall stores,” he said. “The ones I see aren’t walking around watching for bad guys. They’re kind of just walking around hoping nothing bad happens.”

But bad things do happen. Frederic Daniel, 25, of Atlanta, recently was shot and killed during an argument at a mall in that city.

A New Jersey woman is suing a local mall because her son, a bystander, died during an August 1996 shootout between robbers and armored car guards.

Patricia Morris of Clayton says her 17-year-old son, Nicholas, died because the mall allowed the armored car guards to use customers as shields.

One of the alleged robbers was killed. The other, Moses Clary, 24, was charged with killing the 17-year-old; he is expected to go on trial in September.

And a North Carolina mall security guard was arrested in May on charges that he raped two teenage girls he met at the Crabtree Valley Mall.

Held in lieu of $50,000 bond, Willie Donald White Jr., 31, faces one count each of statutory rape and second-degree rape.

Mills blames malls for the sorry state of mall guards. “If you have a person working for $8 to $10 an hour, how far out of your way are you going to go to put yourself in danger?”