It’s no secret that fast food workers frequently encounter disruptive or even abusive customers: Just last month, a video of a chicken nugget “standoff” went viral, featuring a customer who refused to leave the drive-through lane of a Wendy’s store over the restaurant’s prices. In another video, a customer filmed himself berating a McDonald’s employee over their tone. Last year, an angry diner threw soda on a pregnant worker over a mistaken drink order, CNN reported.

Those experiences might not be all that unique, according to a new report on worker safety in the fast food industry. Last Wednesday, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) published a first-of-its-kind analysis that put into numbers just how common issues of assault and harassment are at some of the most popular fast food chains.

The report drew from 911 call logs obtained through public records requests, focusing specifically on calls made from McDonald’s, Burger King, Carl’s Jr., and Jack-in-the-Box locations in California’s nine most populous cities. Between 2017 and 2020, the analysis found, these fast food restaurants were the sites of at least 77,000 violent or threatening incidents. The number includes both instances of abuse directed at workers, as well as conflicts between non-workers on a restaurant’s premises. To calculate this number, the report’s authors broke the 911 records into categories like assault, theft, and verbal threats based on incident descriptions, while filtering out calls corresponding to medical emergencies and traffic accidents. A handful of locations saw 911 calls at a rate of two or more calls per week.

The findings, the report authors wrote, point toward a “crisis of violence” in the industry—the burden of which is disproportionately borne by fast-food workers.

Read the full article about crisis of violence by Jessica Fu at The Counter.