At the heart of the horrific shooting that killed four people at a Manhattan office building on Monday is a tragic irony: All things considered, the building at 345 Park Avenue was relatively well prepared to withstand a violent attack.
It had security personnel — a police officer and at least one security guard in the lobby. It had turnstiles that required a badge to be scanned. And many tenants of the building had the presence of mind to barricade themselves in offices once it became clear that an armed intruder had entered.
“As horrible and heartbreaking as it is that people lost lives in this, it could have been a lot worse had they not had that security protocol,” said Glen Kucera of Allied Universal, which provides security to hundreds of large companies.
He said that additional security might have stopped the attacker but that it was very difficult to completely neutralize an armed assailant who had “made up his mind to hurt people” and was willing or even determined to die. The gunman double-parked his car near the building and began firing upon entering. He killed four people before turning the gun on himself.
Experts on building security say most large office buildings in New York City have something resembling the security measures at the Park Avenue building. They said the real question wasn’t so much whether New York buildings would take additional steps in the aftermath of Monday’s tragedy, but whether buildings and employers in other cities might revise their approaches to be more like those in Manhattan.
“New York is the one city in America where, by far, virtually all high-end buildings have turnstiles,” said Mark Ein, the executive chairman of Kastle Systems, a building security firm with clients around the country. That is not the case in most cities, he said.
New York office buildings have been bolstering their security for decades, amid terrorist attacks and other threats. Experts said there was an additional ramp-up when harassment and violent crime increased earlier this decade.
Chris Pierson, the chief executive of BlackCloak, a firm that provides digital security to top corporate personnel, said that the company noticed a sharp rise of online harassment of executives in 2022 and 2023, and that this was often a “leading indicator” of harassment in person.
Security spending appears to have climbed in line with that trend. From 2021 to 2024, spending on executive security by a typical S&P 500 company that discloses such information more than doubled, according to Equilar, an executive compensation research firm.
Then came the shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel in December. That attack alarmed many executives and seemed to have led to a tightening of security procedures in other buildings.
“Our security program was enhanced following the UHC shooting,” one corporate official wrote in response to a survey by the Partnership for New York City, a group of more than 300 large companies with a significant presence in New York.
“That included adding additional armed security, external surveillance and intelligence resources. We also added the N.Y.P.D. paid overtime detail, which is a critical component of our program,” the official said, referring to the New York Police Department. The survey was conducted after Monday’s Park Avenue killings.
Since the shooting this week, Mr. Kucera of Allied Universal said companies had inquired about putting in place additional security measures. This could include canine teams or a so-called hostile surveillance specialist program, which involves stationing plainclothes armed guards outside a building.
Mr. Kucera said that only about 20 percent of the hundreds of Fortune 500 companies that did business with Allied had such surveillance specialists in place, though he expected the figure to rise in the coming months, and that only high-profile buildings tended to have a uniformed police presence, as at 345 Park. But, he noted, “things are more locked down in New York City than the rest of the country.”
The respondents to the Partnership for New York City survey indicated that they were generally comfortable with their security and unlikely to add to it meaningfully.
But outside New York, business leaders were beginning to grapple with the possibility that they might need to enhance their security as well. Mr. Ein said Kastle had seen an increase in inquiries this week from buildings outside New York.
Michael Hammer, the chief executive of Dickinson Wright, a law firm with more than 500 lawyers in 23 offices in cities across the United States and Canada, said threats or harassment coming from people connected to a legal matter involving the firm had increased since the pandemic.
Mr. Hammer said that the firm typically brought in the police or security to deal with such episodes while also periodically adjusting its protocols, and that it would soon do a general security review. While some of the firm’s offices in large cities have a human security presence in their lobbies and require people to have credentials to enter the buildings, that is not true of all its offices.
“In some smaller locations, it is more of an informal situation,” Mr. Hammer said. “We’ll probably have to investigate it, look at the local tolerance in the office for an armed guard. We’ll have to figure it out because it’s becoming more prevalent.”
Dana Rubinstein and Emma Goldberg contributed reporting.
Noam Scheiber is a Times reporter covering white-collar workers, focusing on issues such as pay, artificial intelligence, downward mobility and discrimination. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
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