We often think of ballistic glass as a strictly an “urban thing.” Total Security Solutions vice president Jim Richards has found that, for most people, “they think of locations like Newark, Baltimore, DC, the Bronx, Detroit, Southside Chicago–they don’t think of sunny Lakeworth Florida. But we see a lot of ballistic glass in the South.” A lack of skyscrapers and yellow cabs simply dose not translate to a lack of armed robberies.
MOBILE THREATS
While New England and the Industrial Midwest are largely composed of major urban areas and their surrounding suburbs, the traditionally agricultural South is quite different. Instead of sprawling urban centers, much of the South comprises large, sparsely populated areas interspersed with small towns. This fosters a disperse threat that, in many respects, is harder to prepare for that in the statistically more dangerous northern industrial hubs. A retail property managers in Chicago knows what areas of the city are risky, and also knows that these risks don’t tend to travel: A 24-hour gas station in Southside Chicago needs ballistic glass; the same gas station a few miles north doesn’t.
In Southern rural regions shops and services are not concentrated–making for more challenging patrols for small police forces–and the population is highly mobile, often driving what a city-dweller would consider an absurd distance to go to a movie or pick up a quick dinner. Threats travel.
BALLISTIC GLASS FOR SOUTHERN TARGETS
Many businesses throughout the South well understand the security realities of traveling bandits; ballistic glass has long been the standard for the many small retail banks and 24-hour gas stations in this region. But the deepening recession and evolving business practices have seen a whole new crop of businesses come under fire.
Chief among these new targets are pharmacies and pain clinics. Notoriously lax regulation of the latter has made Florida a hub for illegal distribution of prescription narcotics, with illicit supply chains radiating throughout the South. As new laws in the Sunshine State clamp down on the open sale of these potent pills, there has been a corresponding rise in armed attacks on the remaining pain clinics, and the many small mom-and-pop pharmacies throughout the Southeast. These sites don’t just offer ready cash, but also the drugs themselves, which can often net as much as $15 per pill on the open market.
The economic downturn has also seen a boom in the sale of scrap metal. This includes both bulk commodity metals being sold to to recycle centers and salvage yards, as well as families selling off their own precious metals, from the family silver to once-treasured gold trinkets. According to Jim, “pretty much anything someone can rip out of a derelict property, they’re recycling today, and that’s good money. Any place that has valuable metals, their gonna have large amounts of cash on hand.”
POOR QUALITY BALLISTIC GLASS
Despite this increased demand, local contractors are often ill-equipped to design and install the ballistic glass systems these businesses need. As Jim notes, “it’s accepted down there that if you’re going to have a gas station, you’re going to have a barrier, so that’s a very evolved market; the local glaziers know what they’re doing in a gas station.” But a gas station isn’t a pharmacy or bank, let alone a recycle center: These are fundamentally different businesses with drastically different facilities and very different needs. When it comes to local glaziers who’ve only done a handful of ballistic jobs, all of them at gas stations, ”it’s rare that you run into too many people who know what they’re doing.”
As he’s traveled through the South (where Total Security Solutions has done a fair amount of business over the years), Jim has seen the same problems over and over again. When gas-station glaziers push beyond their comfort zone, the result is poorly finished ballistic glass deployed in clumsy systems that trip up workers and annoy customers. Worst of all, he sees systems where untrained glaziers have mistakenly used acrylic just one-inch thick, thinking it will stop a shot from a modern handgun.
