The deaths and injuries, bad enough as they are, are not the only evil from a terror attack like the Fishmongers’ Hall knifings. Survivors ask themselves if they could have done more, or anything, to prevent loss of life or suffering. Featured on page 76 is a coroner’s report into the June 2017 London Bridge attack, which raised the uncomfortable question; if the Westminster Bridge attack of March 2017 made it plain that bridges were at risk, and if police had numerous barriers they could place on bridges, why were there none there before the London Bridge attack, only after? In the case of Fishmongers’ Hall you didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry; according to the prison term given the attacker for a terror plot, he should have been in jail until the mid-2020s. For all the talk of the risk of near-instant radicalising over the internet, the Fishmongers’ Hall attacker was a man on the books.
That’s no concern of private security; except that in many other cases, known criminals are still doing crimes. Prison and ‘community sentences’ alike seem not to make any difference. Those two, harsh and soft, justice options collided (page 32) at a recent conference in London on knife crime, handily over the road from the Home Office, and duly attended by posses from central government departments, besides charities. Harsh option has the merit that when in prison, you cannot do crime (so long as jails keep drone-delivered mobile phones out). Soft option has the merit of reforming someone into holding down a job, raising a family; we’re all richer for that. Trouble is; either option costs money. Hasn’t the time come to cost each option, and go with the cheaper one?
A memorable highlight of 2019 was to be driven around the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station building site, a place of pharaonic proportions, as Frank Cannon’s guest (see also page 22). I must try and get a return invite to visit Somerset in the summer. Another highlight was on a smaller scale; and in the sort of place that typically we take for granted; a building society.
As Lee Sweeney’s guest I was shown through a city centre refurbished branch, and have done a long article (from page 38) not much shorter than the Hinkley Point one. How come? Because the security part of the refurb is more than a camera fixed to a wall or a ceiling, and a particular make of shutters or glazing. Security has to fit with what the business parts of a business want to achieve; welcoming customers, while giving staff reason to feel safe, even without screens. In a word, ingenuity. And good sense. That’s why, despite all the bad and wrong things around I enter 2020 with optimism and with, if anything, more curiosity than ever.
If you are short of reading after this edition, just to mention two speakers from last month’s Olympia Expo; former bomb disposal man Andy Oppenheimer has self-published a sci-fi novel, Fields of Orion; and in May Hurst are due to bring out Dan Kaszeta’s history of nerve agents, Toxic.
To freely read the print issue of the monthly magazine visit https://professionalsecurity.co.uk/magazine/.
