Author: Tracey Brown and Michael Hanlon
ISBN No: 9780751553499
Review date: 05/05/2024
No of pages: 288
Publisher: Sphere Books
Publisher URL:
https://www.hachette.co.uk/books/detail.page?isbn=9780751553499
Year of publication: 06/10/2014
Brief:
In Interests of Safety: Absurd Rules that Blight Our Lives
price
£12.99
Does an airline pilot really need to surrender his tweezers at airport security when he’s about to board an aircraft, that has an axe on the back of the cockpit door? Can a mobile phone really cause a major explosion at a petrol station? Is there a good reason why you should be prevented from swimming in a lake more than a foot deep?
As the authors Tracey Brown and Michael Hanlon point out, such rules exist. They say that they seek to empower readers to question the people and organisations who come up with them in the first place. While the title mentions safety, when the book covers airport and airline security, they are talking as much about security. Why, as the book sets out, does the security officer at San Francisco airport have to be so aggressive and petty – asking someone to turn out his pockets when what he has in his pockets are utterly harmless? And while we may imagine that the security at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel would be the most long-winded and thorough, as the book points out, it’s quite the opposite.
The authors could do more to spell out why that is. Presumably the security officers at San Francisco want to do the same job as at Ben Gurion; they want to secure the site and jets from harm. Likewise, the two airports each want passengers to be happy so that they travel again. Somewhere in between – the officers on the ground and the managers and owners in the boardroom – something goes on, and goes wrong at San Francisco, to make the security operation heavy-handed and confrontational – and, the authors hint, actually not as good as Ben Gurion’s. What then makes the difference – tone from the top, business culture, bureaucracy, bad procedures or lack of them, lack of management oversight?
The authors could also do more to consider if there’s something general about bureaucrats or jobsworths or whoever they are, making and living by rules that often are not what the law-makers intended. Take data protection for instance. Do – again, as has happened – law enforcers have to hold back personal details of absconders in the name of data protection? While this is a welcome and readable book, it’s not ploughing a new furrow – Professional Security in 2012 reviewed approvingly an American book, Against Security: How We Go Wrong at Airports, Subways, and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger, by Harvey Molotch. Published 2012 by Princeton University Press, hardback, 260 pages, £25. Visit press.princeton.edu.
A word of praise for the tone of the book; it could be as po-faced as the spoil-sports and bureaucratic idiots and know-alls who ‘blight our lives’, but isn’t.
If you like the sound of Brown and Hanlon’s book, while Hanlon is a science journalist, Tracey Brown is the Director of Sense About Science, a charity that campaigns for better evidence in public debate and policy making.
