Ah, the mornings are turning fresher, we have to listen about football again, and it must be coming to autumn, writes Mark Rowe to introduce the September 2013 print issue of Professional Security magazine.
Back to school, and college. A university security man last month showed me on Youtube a video by Auburn University. Now I don’t have a clue where Auburn is – I asked if it was in Australia. It’s American, and the video is well presented. It’s about what to do if there’s an ‘active shooter’ – a lone gunman we might say – on campus. We saw blue-uniformed campus police, handguns at the ready, going room to room. And the shooter burst into a class, there was a bang, and a man fell to the floor. The other students did as they have been trained to do – throw books and anything at the shooter, to cover him in a blizzard that (you hope) gives them a few seconds to dash out of the door. In another scene, students given warning of a shooter barricaded the door with chairs and desks. My point is that UK university security people are evidently having to consider such a threat – if only because, thanks to the internet, students (and their parents) can view such material and ask their institution: what are you doing about it?! Even though it’s far more likely a UK student will not be shot at but will have a bottle broken over the back of his head at a disco, or have his mobile stolen in a pub.
Besides those security people who work at colleges and unis, many of us have children at or soon to start college, and from what I saw at Leeds, they are in good hands (from page 41, pictured).
You recall in the June issue the centenary of the Association of British Investigators. Regulation of private investigators has seemed as far away as ever – the SIA’s been going ten years, the law for badging of PIs has been in place a dozen. Who saw the Home Secretary announcement (page 22) coming? It’s been welcomed by the ABI and IPI, but all the queries raised in 2007 and 2008, when PI-licensing looked on the horizon, remain. We can divide them into technical and fundamental questions. Technical: as we have no idea how many PIs need badging, how many trainers are needed? Who will invest if you cannot say how many classrooms to book and equip? If you’re a PI with years of experience of police detection, how will you like to be told your job by someone who yesterday taught cookery? How much will the training and the badge cost? As much as for close protection?! Fundamental: if the Government is prompted to badge PIs because of the scandal of hacking voicemails; and blagging of personal data – often for good reasons, to chase bad debts and fraudsters – will SIA badges solve that? Do customers of private investigators, whether corporates or suspicious husbands, want this regulation?
