Whenever readers tell me things, I do pay attention. It’s only good manners, and so often I learn something, besides things that I can report to readers. It came to mind how important it is to pay attention the other Friday night. I was in Leeds, having visited Alan Cain, the head of security services at the university, and I was coming out of a riverside brasserie (yes, really, in Yorkshire!?) to return to my room. The city centre streets looked different in the dark than they had in the early evening on the way to the meal. It was not even that the young men and women were drunker, though no doubt they were; the place seemed somehow less negotiable. I was glad I had been paying attention to Alan Cain’s one-to-one presentation that he had been good enough to give me on personal safety and awareness, as delivered (also by crime prevention officer Andy Gordon-Platt) to freshers, new students on campus this autumn.
As Alan said at one point, it’s about common sense; using initiative; being alert and looking confident. You look ahead, for what’s not normal, as police drivers and Army infantryman are taught to do. So much about what is quaintly called ‘the night-time economy’ – from the door staff with their SIA badges round their upper arms, to the public space CCTV (though see page 24) even to the fob-opened gate and more CCTV at the student lodgings – all are examples of how securitised, if that’s a word, everyday (and night) life in the city has become.
While Professional Security has always been a UK-made publication for UK readers – though of course any reader is welcome – I have featured at some length a report on attacks on aid workers (page 48). Leaving aside the politics and who if anyone is to blame, swathes of Africa and the Middle East look lawless and dangerous for westerners to enter, whether on business, to offer aid, or to report. A sinister development is the online beheading of hostages, by killers with English accents. If students are to ‘walksafe’ when they come out of the pub and night-club in their new town or city centre (page 22), they have to apply the same principles as used by aid workers or United Nations peace-keepers in South Sudan, and indeed by British soldiers when on convoy duty in Basra, after what looks like the ever more fateful invasion of Iraq in 2003. The stakes are higher (but how much higher?) for aid convoy drivers in Darfur than an 18-year-old on the street at midnight in Norwich or Nottingham, whose parents might be glad not to know how worse for wear he (or indeed she) is. It’s asking a lot of security officers on their pay, but whether working a door or on patrol or as a steward marshalling a crowd (page 36), lives are in their hands.
