Today, Wednesday, December 4, 2024, some 19 ‘powerful people’ were due to meet in London about how to do more, better, with private security in the public realm. It has potential, Mark Rowe writes.
As anyone at a wedding reception or any committee meeting knows, the risk of any such number of people gathering is that no matter how strong the organiser, the whole breaks up into several conversations. Also, that no matter how good the intentions, and connections between those attending, a gathering can turn into a mere ‘talking shop’. Also, each one present has a surprisingly short time to speak, just as each footballer in a 90-minute game will only have a couple of minutes on the ball. Likewise, allowing for pauses, if the meeting lasted two hours, the mathematics is simple; each of the 19 had about six minutes to speak. Assuming a speed of 100 words a minute, that’s 600 words; not many, to put your point of view and to comment on others’. Consider; it’s only about four times the words written so far.
To detail at least some of the 19: a director from Transport for London, a considerable buyer of private security and other uniformed services; the supermarket chains Tesco (Woolwich store, pictured) and Morrison’s, each looking to respond to the inconsistent response from the police when stores detain shop thieves, by further equipping and tasking their contract security officers to handcuff thieves, to await police to make an arrest – as those retailers appreciate that otherwise thieves, wise thanks to online chat, will exploit any retailer’s lesser security measures; Assistant Chief Constable Jenny Gilmer, whose work through the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) has included leading on ‘Right Care Right Person’, the police policy of not attending call-outs if there’s not a crime and a risk to life, and the ‘right care’ is by a mental health or other professional; talking of health, NHS England; the Security Industry Authority; the Home Office; Sussex’s Conservative police and crime commissioner (PCC) Katy Bourne, the PCC world’s go-to person on crime against business; Paul Evans, the CEO of the SIA approved contractor Carlisle Support Services; Hannah Wadey, chief of the London-based Safer Business Network (SBN); and a business improvement district (BID). Chairing: the criminologist Prof Martin Gill, of Perpetuity Research.
Why?
Taking for granted the achievement of 19 such busy people agreeing to attend: what for? You need look no further than Martin Gill’s recently released, and freely downloadable, latest work through his Security Research Initiative (SRI), on police and private security collaboration. To sum up; it’s a public good, it suits police and the security industry alike, and plenty of good practice is around; yet it’s patchy, and what’s called for is some clearing house to identify ‘what works’ and spread it. In a word, leadership. Hence while all around that table have an interest in better use of private security in the public realm, it’s for the police to ‘own’.
Already happening
While not denying the importance of whatever these 19 may push forward, note that private security is already, and ever more, at work in public space; on high streets for BIDs and local government, protecting critical national infrastructure (CNI) such as nuclear power stations and railway stations, and ‘iconic sites’ such as cathedrals and museums. To take only one instance, use of Home Office Safer Streets Fund money. Wiltshire’s Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner, Philip Wilkinson, passed to Swindon Council money for ‘wardens’ to patrol ‘hot spots’ for anti-social behaviour; hired SIA-badged private security officers. The November edition of Professional Security Magazine featured Salisbury; similar is going on there (click here for further link to Wiltshire PCC website). Fifteen years ago, that would have been controversial, even politically impossible; the police may well have tried to run out of town any guard firm doing such on-street work, which was the preserve of the police. What’s changed? Among other things, the SIA regime (begun in the mid-2000s) has taken root.
Connections
Those 19 meeting are each authoritative people, representing weighty institutions; the private security people can consider themselves equals, in terms of length of career, academic qualification and benefit to society. And they’re already connected. Katy Bourne after re-election in May is serving her fourth term as a PCC; that’s the longest possible, as the first PCC election was in 2012. By comparison, Martin Gill was researching and publishing on armed robbery in the 1990s; I attended his inaugural lecture as a professor at the University of Leicester in the early 2000s; for the Home Office in the 2000s he carried out research on the effectiveness of CCTV. Katy Bourne has spoken at the thought leadership afternoon he runs on the eve of his OSPAs (Outstanding Security Performance Awards) in London each February.
What’s wanted
What might the 19 set to work on? Ways of developing that public space work by private security. Such work is demanding; police-like. Police internally have their hands full, absorbing the ‘uplift’ of probationary officers; a security officer who’s been on the same patch for years may compare well with what services a young cop may provide; the security person may have more life experience, and local knowledge. But how to know? At least one big city took a misstep in hiring such patrollers; it turned out that the retail security guards hired lacked the necessary knowledge of streets, all-important to report suspicious behaviour or incidents to the 999 services, council CCTV control room operators and others. The city did better hiring a second time. Hence the 19 could set to work on some means of recognising those extras beyond the minimum expressed by the SIA licence, whether a stripe or tick on the piece of plastic, or (let’s say) badges on the arm, like in Scouting, for passing training courses in behavioural detection, ‘intelligent patrolling’, crime scene preservation, customer service, fluency in foreign languages and so forth. Much good could flow from that. Police would have (more) confidence in those officers. The extras would be something for the ambitious to aim at; it could justify higher pay (and margins for guarding contractors); could help attract people into the private security sector, and retain them.
Like CSAS?
One query I have; would this ‘SIA badge-plus’ be like the long-running CSAS (community safety accreditation scheme)? Whereby typically SIA-badged officers will get vetted and trained by police and, maybe, given police-like powers, such as to issue fines for dog fouling or littering. While CSAS has its place, its uptake is far from widespread, partly because of police shortcomings (the vetting takes months; usually you have to apply to each police force, which means several lots of work if you’re intending to go after this market in, say, the home counties or East Anglia). CSAS has its niches, separate from ‘SIA badge-plus’, for instance for the directing of traffic outside sports grounds.
We could grumble about who’s missing from the 19 or whether all of the 19 are pulling in the right direction. Last week at the two-day National Association for Healthcare Security conference (day one chaired by Prof Martin Gill; it’s a small world), NAHS chair Roger Ringham closed the event by expressing ‘disappointment’ at NHS England for delay on core standards for security management. Since the disbanding of NHS Protect in 2017, the National Health has central work done on emergency planning, and counter-fraud; but not security management, which may seem perverse given the terror attacks of 2017, and the seeming near-miss of the bomb in the taxi outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital in November 2019. An SIA speaker at NAHS, Paul Fullwood, could only promise a review in 2025 when a member of the audience asked for a healthcare-specific SIA licence (more in the January edition of Professional Security Magazine). In truth the SIA has resisted, or rather left it to sector bodies to lead on, such ‘plus’ licences. Everyone has been waiting for everyone else; and work has to start somewhere.
