Baltimore ? A former employee at a Baltimore County automotive repair shop lurked nearby in the days after his firing last year, watching the comings and goings from across the street. Employees feared that he was plotting revenge.

What the ex-employee didn’t know was that he, too, was being watched.

Philip Deming, a consultant in workplace violence prevention, had set up a “counter surveillance” operation. Deming had been called by the small company’s president to intervene after spotting the man outside and being told by employees that he had been out there for days.

The disgruntled employee apparently made threats against the company and was eventually arrested on weapons charges, preventing what could have been an explosive situation in the workplace, according to Deming, who declined to identify the company, citing client confidentiality.

Workplace violence prevention efforts and policies have become more commonplace, much as sexual harassment training has become an integral part of doing business. More employers are taking steps to thwart a range of threatening acts — such as harassment, bullying, stalking and physical assaults — by hiring consultants like Deming and implementing protocols.

That greater awareness and intervention may have contributed to a decline in the mass shootings that captured headlines in the late 1980s and early 1990s, workplace experts believe. Homicides in workplaces fell 52 percent to 526 in 2008 since reaching a high of 1,080 in 1994, according to U.S. Department of Labor statistics released in April.

But workplace violence hasn’t been eradicated. One grim reminder: The shooting spree two weeks ago at a Connecticut beer distributor, in which eight victims and the shooter died.

About 2 million U.S. workers each year are victims of some kind of workplace assault, according to frequently cited statistics from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration reports. And most workplaces in the U.S. — 70 percent — do not have either a formal program or policy in place to address the problem, a study by the National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health found.

“Workplace violence is something a lot of employers don’t like to talk about, because of the ‘It can’t happen here’ mentality,” Deming said. “People don’t want to believe it can happen, and if someone does act out, it is viewed as a personal problem that should be handled outside the workplace.”

When violence erupts at work, it can be deadly.

Other incidents

On Aug. 3, Omar Thornton pulled two guns from his lunch bag after he was forced to resign from his job at Hartford Distributors in Manchester, Conn. He killed eight people before turning the gun on himself.

In July, the former boyfriend of a worker at Emcore solar and fiber-optics company in Albuquerque, N.M., killed six people, including himself, and wounded four others in a rampage officials believe stemmed from a custody dispute.

In March, a supermarket meat cutter at a Publix in Tarpon Springs, Fla., was shot and killed in his car outside the store by a co-worker who police said had been fired after threatening the meat cutter, who reportedly taunted her at work. And in January, at a truck rental company in Kennesaw, Ga., a disgruntled former employee shot four employees and one customer, killing three people.

Last October, 54-year-old Dennis Leon McLaughlin walked into direct-mail company Keary Advertising Co. in eastern Baltimore County and opened fire, killing company owner Wayne Lee Keary. As employees ran screaming through a side door, McLaughlin left by a main entrance and shot himself. He later died. Police pegged his motive to a dispute involving his estranged wife, an employee.

Prevention, training

Violence prevention programs and policies encourage employees to spot disruptive behavior and recognize signs of domestic disputes that could follow an employee to work. Sometimes they incorporate training in how to respond to an on-site shooter.

Consultants say they’re seeing upticks in attendance at prevention seminars and more requests for training. They say companies have become more sensitive to at-risk employees and more likely in recent years to offer help to keep problems from escalating. Yet employers are still far too likely to focus on workplace violence when it might be too late –or after an incident occurs, they say.

Too often, while security or human resources managers might be on the lookout for potential triggers of workplace violence, such as employer reprimands and terminations or financial difficulties and family problems, rank-and-file co-workers might not be trained to look for those warning signs.

It wasn’t until the early to mid-1990s that larger and more progressive firms started to address workplace violence, said Barry Nixon, executive director of the National Institute for Prevention of Workplace Violence, a consulting firm. Even now, he said many companies might have a written policy but fewer undertake training and risk assessment.

Nonetheless, Nixon said, he has seen increased demand for workplace violence prevention training, which he offers to private industry and government agencies.

“We’re reaching more and more employers who understand they need to get ahead of the curve, as opposed to being reactionary when something happens,” he said.