Something I have had a bee in my bonnet about for some years has been the lack of a national, written, statement of policies for the patrolling by hired security of outright public space, such as high streets. Such a document would not only acknowledge the public policing by private security, but supply a baseline to a town or business district wanting to start such patrols, and spread good practice.
What equipment should a patroller carry, what should they be trained in; what about communicating and sharing crime or other information with the emergency services. The alternative, as commonly seen in public spaces, is uniforms of all colours, and everyone inventing the same wheels.
Police would have to have at least a say in such documents, and it would at least be politic to ask them to draw up the documents, as they have been so protective of the monopoly of policing public space. I happened recently to bump into a senior cop who, at the College of Policing, judging by his title and responsibilities would be the very person to lead on such documents. My conversation with him was disillusioning – not in any bad sense; rather, that I lost my illusions about how likely such documents are to ever get made.
Employer liability
The affable enough cop first raised the personal safety of the patroller – the employer is liable. This was the first of several reasons, each fair enough, for the College not taking up such work. As for the confusion for the public about variously-coloured patrollers – to take Derby as an example, besides the city council’s public protection officers in black (pictured left), one business improvement district (BID) has rangers patrolling in purple; another, neighbouring BID has its rangers in green. The work of the purple, Cathedral Quarter (CQ) rangers and green, St Peter’s Quarter rangers (pictured right), according to each BID’s business plan, includes ‘security checks on premises’, which was (generations ago) the stock in trade of beat bobbies. Other BIDs and councils hiring such on-street patrollers may opt for what we could call ‘harder’ uniformed security, issued with handcuffs to detain shop thieves. That edges such hired officers more towards the actual police, though only police have the power of arrest; a security officer has the same powers as a citizen to hold somebody. Those hiring a ‘harder’ service may like it that the ranger, warden, whatever they’re called, will respond to an on-street beggar by standing in front of them, making it impossible for them to receive any money. Sooner or later the beggar will move; displaced elsewhere; maybe to a shopping street where another BID employs more ambassadorial-style officers, who, though SIA-badged, have been tasked with not getting physical with wrong-doers, simply reporting crimes to the police, and merely passing beggars and saying ‘how are you?’.
Hard or soft
The employer indeed has a choice of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ security. Couldn’t that be signalled by uniforms of a particular colour? Or is the on-street patrolling on a spectrum, from ‘soft’ to ‘hard’, the same as policing is ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ depending on context (Saturday afternoon as away football fans travel to a stadium, unsmiling, hard: Notting Hill Carnival, soft – if only because in the crush, even if a crime happens yards away, police physically cannot intervene). The cop had a point. If a council or BID wants its patrollers in red or blue, who’s to stop them?! It took police in Brighton long enough (until rationalisation of force areas in 1968) to stop wearing white helmets.
What about radio communications? Police are proprietorial about their comms – understandably; at a busy event, above all Notting Hill, the radio network is strained enough without letting in non-police users. It’s for police at a divisional or neighbourhood level to come to agreement about how or whether police listen to a Pubwatch scheme’s radio, or whether a council CCTV control room can have an Airwave radio (or its replacement, due around 2029) on an operator’s desk. To return to the spectrum of BID patrollers, above all in London, quite apart from it being hard to imagine the several competitor providers of the patrollers cooperating on one radio scheme, what would be the use of a common channel – the patroller at Marble Arch seldom needs to know what’s happening on The Strand.
Practice bank
As for good practice, whether in public-private cooperation or anything, the cop pointed to the College’s ‘practice bank’. Of its 20 categories, ‘operational policing’ and ‘crime prevention’ may be closest to public-private cooperation. If a police force is doing something well, they should write perhaps a couple of thousand words, and send it to the College. Everyone stands to gain (assuming someone has the time and skills to write their work up): the College online hosts good practice, the author gets credit for good work; and other places, we can hope, copy ‘what works’ and with time HM Inspectorate of Constabulary can inspect it. While some of the topics are relevant to hired patrollers, such as body-worn video, and a summer policing plan for a seaside town, generally it’s police (or police and crime commissioners’ offices) that send items for the ‘bank’.
It’s hard enough for the police to identify good practice, and institutionalise it, without taking on further subjects that are at least partly matters for other interest groups – whether other emergency services, or business or charities. The College, then, will have little interest in giving itself extra work, when it has more than enough to do already – to name some strands of work: vetting (for police to get its own house in order, given the Sarah Everard case, arguably the single most challenging case for British policing of the 2020s so far), artificial intelligence and the applying of digital tech generally (that central government and everyone else is scrambling to keep up with); firearms; ethics; and training of officers from the starters to leaders in all those.
Photo by Sue Rushton.
