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In one of his early books Dig Where You Stand, the great Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist mentioned some Swedish cement factory workers whom while on holiday in Italy, went into a cement factory to look at how others did the work. Should private security people take the same attitude? asks Mark Rowe.
If you invest self-dignity in your work, it makes sense, given the opportunity, to keep your work in mind at all times. Maybe you cannot forget that you carry out security surveys, and cannot help looking at the siting of a surveillance camera or the upkeep of a fenceline. Itโs just as valid on holiday to leave your work at home and go on a beach, in a forest or up a mountain and seek to forget your everyday existence.
Security management may be an exception. On health and safety, let alone security, grounds you may not be allowed to invite yourself into a factory as Lindqvistโs 1970s Swedes were. If you were to arouse suspicion in Paris and a security or police officer, on especial alert due to the Olympics, were to ask you your business, you could find that the French you learnt at school, how to ask the price of something in the boulangerie, did not equip you for explaining that you have a professional interest in security. Those security clearance badges you can show? They may only arouse suspicion further.
The Continent does affect UK private security โ the Continental multi-national contract companies Sodexo and Securitas for example in the market, and in retrospect the Bataclan and Stade de Paris terror attacks of November 2015 were a turning point in the UKโs approach to site protection against terrorism, and UK border security continues to be a political sore point, regardless of which political party is in power. Yet itโs hard to think of cases of UK security people drawing fully, regularly, or at all on Continental private security practice.
Perhaps the security industry man or woman on holiday can gain most simply by keeping their eyes open and spotting the security features among the rest of life. That man in the alarm response car is wearing a beret as part of his uniform. Gaudiโs Sagrada Familia in Barcelona has had anti-ram bollards added around its perimeter, not in keeping in colour or in style with the masterpiece (pictured, October evening, 2018). That brings in the spotting of changes over time โ when I first saw the cathedral in the 1990s it didnโt have the bollards.
My best friendโs eldest is Interrailing and is due to be in Berlin on Sunday during the England-Spain final in the Euros football. How cool is that? It begs the question of travel risk, and what to advise the non-security specialist. Itโs a balance, between being a genuine help and a nag โ donโt carry your wallet or phone in an outside pocket, let alone an unbuttoned back pocket! Remember to hydrate! Donโt talk to strange men in toilets! When in truth the young are probably much the same as we were, when we were their age, a mix of the sensible, dauntless, naรฏve and silly. A difference now is that thanks to the mobile phone any traveller can have maps and can send a message to reassure parents, and (as featured in the August edition of Professional Security Magazine) can have a tracking app that can be linked to an advisory service that can send you security or other alerts (such as a transport workersโ strike). Like so much else, that can bring risk besides benefits if you look too obviously at it on the street and, by your lack of situational awareness, attract the attention of a robber. That’s as true when you’re walking any day in your own city; see useful personal safety advice on the We Are Waterloo website.
Is travel better now or before such tech? Each age had its charm โ once, you had the thrill of just you and your wits in a new place; now, you have the power from so much knowledge at your fingertips. Then as now what matters is to keep eye-openness, because you have no way of knowing what will come to have meaning in your memory โ whether the chance conversations with beautiful strangers, wisteria covering the front of a house on the road to Bayeux, the sign for a village called Jerusalem where men fought in the summer of 1944, the stubs of cigarettes in pools of rainwater at the Acropolis, or the hum or hush of a great city on a Sunday night.
