Research: Characteristics of Fatal Workplace Violence Incidents

By Scott Briscoe

24 March 2025

The survey that provided the foundation for ASIS’s research report, Active Assailant Preparedness: Risks and Recommendations, sponsored by Everbridge, asked an interesting question: Did your organization experience an instance of workplace violence that resulted in one or more fatalities in the last five years?

Such incidents are exceedingly rare; most security professionals go their entire careers without experiencing one. However, a total of 46 security professionals taking the survey answered affirmatively. While that number is not enough for rigorous statistical analysis, it can provide insights that, at the very least, can serve as important considerations.

One note on this analysis: Suicide is a prevalent kind of workplace violence that has a fatality. However, some security professionals may not consider suicide a workplace violence incident, and the survey did not attempt to clarify that suicide should explicitly count as one, leaving it to the interpretation of each survey participant. However, of those who said they did experience a workplace violence fatality, just over 20 percent said the incident they experienced was suicide with no other fatalities.

Key findings from the analysis:

Organization size. As one would expect, larger organizations are more likely to have faced a workplace violence incident with a fatality than smaller organizations. However, the prevalence of such incidents is roughly equal when comparing North America to the rest of the world.

Motives. A high proportion of incidents—43 percent—were perpetuated by someone with no apparent connection to the organization. However, just under one-third of incidents (29 percent) related to the termination of an employee.

Room for improvement. Those who experienced an incident felt relatively confident that they were successful at interacting with first responders. They were less confident that they effectively stood up a command-and-control center to manage the incident or that they had effectively communicated with people in their facility or on campus during the incident.

Demographic Analysis

Starting with demographics of the organizations involved, we examined two questions to see if there may be a correlation worth considering: geographic location and size of company.

The survey was promoted to ASIS members, and while ASIS is a global organization, it has significantly more members in North America than other regions. The only reasonable hypothesis to test is to compare results from North America (65 percent or respondents) to results from outside North America (35 percent). Given the prevalence of firearms in the United States and the effect of cartels in Mexico, one might expect more cases of workplace violence incidents that involve a fatality in North America than the rest of the world. However, the survey results do not support that hypothesis: 7 percent of security professionals in North America encountered such a fatality versus 6 percent outside of North America.

Logically, one would expect that the larger the organization, the more likely that it has experienced a workplace violence fatality, and that is exactly what the survey found. One in six security professionals had experienced such a fatality at organizations with more than 50,000 employees. For organizations with 5,000 to 50,000 employees, it is one in 12.5 security professionals. For those with fewer employees, the ratio is one in 22.

Characteristics of the Incident

Nearly four in 10 of workplace violence incidents that resulted in fatalities were actions taken by an employee or former employee (39 percent), and seven percent said the perpetuator was a relation or friend of an employee. Another one in five said customers, students, or other nonemployee constituents were responsible for the violence (21 percent). However, 43 percent said the incident appeared to be a random act of violence that did not target their organization specifically.

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The survey asked security professionals to rate how well their organization did at tasks related to active assailant incidents that involve fatalities on a scale of one to five as follows:

1: Performed far worse than needed or don’t have capability
2: Performed poorly, there is much room for improvement
3: Worked well in some ways, but could be better
4: Overall worked well, could make small improvements
5: Worked exactly as we needed

Examining the weighted averages of these questions yielded four rough categories.

Standing alone at the top of the list, security professionals said their organizations shined brightest when it came to coordinating with law enforcement. The three areas that rate just a little lower were sharing information with executives and others who need to know; making a quick, decisive lockdown decision; and providing grief counseling or other support.

The areas that were more mixed included communicating with family or implementing reunification plans; locating people in the building or campus; and getting real-time updates as the situation unfolded. The areas that scored lowest were establishing a command-and-control center to deal with the incident and sending alerts and communications to people in the building or campus.

How well did the organization do at the following actions during and as a result of the workplace violence incident involving a fatality?
Action	Weighted average of 5-point scale
Top
Coordinating with law enforcement	3.85
Performed well
Sharing information with executives and other need-to-know personnel	3.56
Quick decisive lockdown or evacuation decision	3.46
Providing grief counseling or other support	3.42
Could have been better
Communicating with family or implementing reunification	3.28
Locating people in the building or campus	3.22
Getting real-time updates as the situation unfolded	3.19
Performed poorly
Establishing a command-and-control center to deal with the incident	3.07
Sending alerts and communications to people in building or campus	2.89

Post-Incident Analysis

The survey asked if the organization had done any active assailant training or planning in the 12 months prior to the fatal incident. Most—79 percent—reported that they had. Of those, 18 percent said the training definitely saved lives and another 41 percent saying they believed the training helped and possibly saved lives. That leaves 41 percent who said the training did not apply to their situation, probably had no impact, or they were unsure if the training had an impact.

Curiously, 54 percent reported that the incident did not lead to changes to the organization’s security approach. Those who did make changes were asked to briefly describe them yielding results that included:

“Sensitization and awareness campaign on identifying aggrieved persons as well as emotional intelligence and management training to enable personnel to handle the situation better.”
“Reviewed the security plan and drafted a new SOP for operations to mitigate the risk.”
“Weapons detection installed, AI facial recognition implemented, armed security unit created.”
“Clarified the roles of those involved with handling the situation.”

One interesting finding that would be useful for additional study is that organizations who experienced a workplace violence fatality and those that didn’t deployed threat management teams at a similar rate: 65 percent. However, security professionals at organizations that experienced a workplace violence fatality are far more likely to report that the threat management team took an action or instigated an intervention that likely saved the organization from a serious workplace violence incident: 63 percent, compared to 43 percent at organizations that had not experienced a fatal incident. Further study is needed to determine if that is statistical noise or if having experienced a fatal workplace violence incident leads to more effective threat management teams.