A security man of a property on Leicester Square (‘on the square’, for short) in central London described the patrollers, hired from My Local Bobby as ‘essential, absolutely essential’. Those uniformed patrollers do joint patrols with police. As the security man pointed out, police are stretched, even in that ‘epicentre’ of London’s West End. Some large landowners in that part of London whose property holdings are valued in the hundreds of millions of pounds) not only pay the business improvement district (BID) levy, which goes partly on the patrols, but pay extra.
Why? Leicester Square has long been as busy at midnight as midday. The visitors and the criminals who prey on them are different by day and night. Pick-pockets prey on gatherings, such as around street performers. If you watch the crowds you can learn to spot the criminals, who may work in teams. One may wear a single earbud, because that spotter needs one ear free to listen for any relevant noise from the crowd, and one ear to hear messages from the pick-pocket that the spotter directs. By night, violence may be aggravated, as the thieves (who may come out of the Underground station) are readier to threaten with knives (and even large, ‘zombie’ knives); as known to police from when they carry out ‘stop and search’. Police also carry out pre-event operations to spot hostile reconnaissance before parties or first nights at the cinema. Patrols by contract security of Leicester Square and the West End date from the 2000s; that is, several years before the police became generally comfortable with private patrolling of entirely public space rather than the semi-public space of shopping centres.
CSAS
Also about 20 years is the CSAS (community safety accreditation scheme). Security managers still tell Professional Security of how they are interested in gaining CSAS for their guard forces, only to make no headway, perhaps because the vetting and training by police take so long that the officers move on. Each of those aspects of CSAS add to the cost of a guard force and ‘cost is king’ as one security manager puts it. Another obstacle to CSAS all along has been that generally it’s signed off by a chief constable. A guard accredited by Essex with police-like powers, such as the power to issue fines for littering, doesn’t have those same powers in another police force area, Hertfordshire or Cambridgeshire, let’s say; that would take more time, and money. Some chief constables are more enthusiastic about CSAS than others. For that to change (for the better, allowing wider working) would imply central direction by the Home Office. Similarly the sharing of good and best practice is crying out for the equivalent of the College of Policing, set up by the Home Office, given that police have enough on their plate without telling the security industry its business, and by the nature of competition and the need to focus on staying in business security contractors don’t have the time to share.
Prospect
Besides the demand for private patrollers, the supply of authority figures in public space remains in jeopardy, despite the refrain by the Labour Government of neighbourhood policing. Police forces like the public sector in general faces (more) years of cutting to balance the books, which may well mean community support officers (PCSOs) get cut, so as to defend warranted officers. While understandable, and protecting the 999 service, that PCSOs came in, in the mid-2000s (under the previous Labour Government) precisely to fill a perceived gap not met by the police, of (cheaper) uniformed officers who did not need the power of arrest but provided a reassuring presence, would imply that they’ll be missed.
SIA-plus?
For private security to fill that gap, more fully than it has in the last 20 years under CSAS, might require an ‘SIA-plus’ badge, a development of the SIA licensing regime that also has not altered much, since it came in, in the mid-2000s. At least one guarding contractor is offering such a ‘plus’ service to at least one central Government department, while staying within the SIA regime. While security officers with the SIA door security or security officer badge guard premises out of hours when closed, operatives with the SIA close protection badge are employed in opening hours to carry out reception duties, besides security of the assets. While the handful of large contractors that alone would have the capacity to carry out nationwide public realm contracts have shown little interest in bidding for BID work (pardon the pun), as the volume of such niche work isn’t worth their while, some guard firms are looking at the potentially large possibilities, for instance of an ‘SIA-plus’ guarding service for critical national infrastructure (CNI), by SIA-badged officers with training beyond the five-day basic required to apply for the licence. Such as: specific trackside training for working on the railways, the law around mental health sectioning and safe handling of patients for hospitals, and the directing of traffic and heavy loads, for example for building sites or stadiums (something that falls under CSAS). The possible model for funding such a service for utilities, let’s say, could be like the paying for the British Transport Police force that covers the railways, as paid for by rail operators. The appetite for utilities (to single out one field of CNI) to have such a service will be lacking, unless some incident happens. Another model could be the community safety patrollers by London boroughs, paid for by service charges of housing tenants. The imperative is to show value for money, just as with the patrolling and other services provided by BIDs, because those paying want to see results, even if the charge to a tenant amounts to £1 a week. A borough’s patrollers or wardens may respond to residents’ concerns and complaints, whether the filming of (loud) music videos locally, or drug dealing outside homes. The principle is to have a reserve of bodies (like the Met Police’s Territorial Support Group) to deploy. Patrolling, then, is not merely the (equipped and trained) patrollers, but implies a control room to take calls and deploy teams, and to respond to patroller calls for assistance; unless the BID or council or landowner hiring the patrollers agrees protocols with the police for them to give a sharper assistance than to a 999 call. Police no matter how willing will always triage calls in terms of threat, risk and harm; and may be committed to a road accident or search for a missing child.
Photo by Mark Rowe: offices, central London.
