A discussion about search regimes at the entrance to sites; continued.
I got as far as the table inside the vestibule of the Supreme Court in Westminster, where security officers from Carlisle Support Services do the searching. When I mentioned that I was carrying two (half-litre) plastic bottles (which I couldn’t deny because they were visible), the officer politely asked me to take a ‘little sip’ from each. Later on the Supreme Court website, I saw that was a policy among the ‘security information‘.
It made sense; if you are carrying something toxic, whether thoughtlessly or out of malice, a give-away will be that you feel unable to take a sip. Amusingly, I was indeed unwilling to take a sip of the first bottle I did because it was double-strength blackcurrant cordial; but I did anyway. I was already thirsty, so when I came to the other bottle, of water, I drank it all.
What a contrast to the post-covid treatment in the checkpoint at Birmingham University, when (the first time I had flown for some years due to the pandemic) I forgot that I was not meant to carry similarly a bottle of water, because I did not feel like paying airport prices for a bottle, airside. The security officer, once he saw the full bottle, refused to let me drink it, and instead took it away unhurriedly – leaving me waiting – and returned with the empty bottle, and continued the (now enhanced) search.
But to return to the Supreme Court; despite having taken my belt off, and could not think that I was carrying any metal, the detection arch went off, and another security officer with good manners asked me to raise my arms and spread my legs so as to be ‘wanded’, facing him, and then turning around to have the other side of myself wanded. As an aside, note in the United States that the federal Transportation Security Agency (TSA) is offering the prospect in a couple of years of swifter, less intrusive ‘wanding’ with a ‘wand’ with a viewing screen. Coincidentally, the person behind me visiting the Court was wheelchair-bound; such a wand would be more able to actually check a chair-bound person (no matter how elderly and sweet-looking, who’s to say, they could pose a threat as much as anyone, whether by themselves or as an accomplice) without requiring them to raise themselves or be touched.
The Supreme Court, to sum up, seemed to have the balance right: neither lax, whether in the (possibly well-meaning) name of throughput or out of complacency, nor unsmilingly strict. I made sure to pay a compliment once inside (and indeed do here).
Across Parliament Square, I recently made a social visit to the House of Lords for the first time since covid. There, the Palace of Westminster does have some stand-off distance, and you present yourself to Metropolitan Police officers who check that you are on a tablet of expected visitors (I wasn’t). Once inside, to cut the story short, again it was a Met Police officer who carried out the airport-style search, and I felt able to have a bantering conversation about how men have such an embarrassingly large amount of belongings in their pockets, whereas women more sensibly have a handbag.
Once issued with a pass (wear at all times, leave on exit), the visitor waits to be collected in a cloakroom which reminded me of my infants’ school, or Hogwarts; coats on pegs, and newspapers on wooden rods as in library reading rooms in the old days, or Viennese cafes. To go to a social event in a House of Lords meeting room, you find yourself going through one of two detection arches sited in a rather cramped room; the Victorian architects could not imagine the need to house such machinery.
Searches may happen in retail for loss prevention purposes: I have seen in Boots security officers asking shoppers to open their bags, the same routinely at a Premier League club shop. At such a stadium, the type of visitor may change over the week. A match day fan may well come from abroad; clubs have had to prohibit ticket-holders from bringing anything larger than a handbag, to rule out visitors pulling their luggage. A suitcase would be simply impossible to fit under your seat and too much of a safety hazard. In the week, stadia routinely hold corporate events. Then such a rule may well be relaxed, while you still go through airport-style screening. While attending the conference of the Chartered Institute of Information Security (CIISec) at the Etihad, the home of Manchester City FC (pictured, Bosch cameras looking out from the corporate area to the field of play) in November, I spotted that Security was also using some sort of video analytics, in a semi-overt way, just as a supermarket might employ a security officer to stand behind a monitor, to watch in-store video surveillance cameras; neither overt nor covert. You don’t know what the officer is looking at; a kind of ‘security-minded communication’, to reassure the law-abiding and to put off the criminal. Because who’s to say what the type of analytics is – gait analysis, to spot an unnatural or ungainly walk because you are carrying a concealed bottle of alcohol or haul of meat? Or a search for unusual bulges in clothes?
In the December print edition of Professional Security Magazine, as part of a review of 2023, we speculated about how artificial intelligence could connect odour analysis of the air of a large open space (even an airport terminal) to the relevant camera that would pan and tilt to the suspect carrying a suspicious odour (explosives, drugs, whatever you train the AI on) and carry out a facial check against a watch-list.
The prospect, then, is of an end or at least a drastic-looking change, to the security checkpoint table and x-ray machine combination. A search would happen while people are flowing through a building, before they go airside, or while they’re eating and drinking at concessions at a concert venue, before they enter the access-controlled concert hall proper. However, to state the obvious, tech here does not make security people redundant. If the tech triggers an alert, someone has to respond, which would demand a change in the nature of the job of search security. Instead of someone suspicious – whether carrying a knife, or packet of illegal drugs – cropping up after they’re stationary at the checkpoint, someone (in uniform, or plain-clothes?) has to intervene. If the suspect is in the middle of a crowd in the middle of a concourse, is Security going to direct the suspect to a corner, a separate room? Or carry out the search on the spot?
This brings new risks. If the x-ray search throws up a possible knife, or the outline of what might be a bomb or something prohibited, the bag is already separate from the suspect and indeed the rest of the crowd. The search regime of the future may promise a freer entrance to public and restricted sites – and the potential market for search products that allow freer movement is enormous: but it could introduce risks for the security officers, and a need for them to carry out dynamic risk assessment.
