The Security TWENTY series of events returned to Glasgow for the first time since the covid pandemic on Tuesday, October 5. Earlier, on Monday evening, diners raised some £1080 for charity.
The good cause was Children 1st Scotland, as suggested by one of the diners, who was a speaker at the conference side of ST in the morning, Maxine Fraser, head of Retailers Against Crime, the membership body that gathers intelligence on shop thieves. Returning to speak, having spoken at the last, pre-covid ST event in Glasgow in 2019, Maxine talked the audience through various sorts of shop thieves, whether stealing locally to feed a drug addiction, or higher-value, more prolific and organised thieves.
The opening speaker was the director of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit, Niven Rennie, the former senior Scottish policeman who set out the VRU’s public health approach to tackling violence – an approach that he no longer has to explain, since coronavirus, he observed. He described how policing and criminal justice approaches to violent crime were not working, and how a partnership approach could offer hope and an answer to deprivation, physical and mental abuse and neglect that lay behind the life stories of many in prison. Rennie touched also on the Unit’s latest five-year strategy and ‘six actions for a safer Scotland for all’.
The conference also heard from Gary Stephen, the head of security at the University of Glasgow. He talked through his uni’s take-up of a mass notification product, SafeZone from CriticalArc (among the exhibitors at ST21 Glasgow) for student and staff safety, whether for emergency response or personal safety on campus or when at leisure, or when travelling aboard. Another return speaker was David Scott, previously of New College Lanarkshire (also exhibiting at the show), now MD of the skills body Skills for Security, who with Darrell Gilmour, SfS director of technical training, covered apprenticeships.
The conference also heard manufacturer updates; from John Goy of BT, and Ross Copeland of Hikvision.
The dinner also saw a revival of the ‘heads and tails game’ by Professional Security magazine MD Roy Cooper, who got the diners to stand and guess the outcome of the toss of a coin and gamble by putting their hands on their heads, or tails (rear). Those who guessed wrongly had to sit, until the last two were standing and a winner emerged.
The ST21 year ends as usual in London in November – at a new venue, Twickenham Stadium, on Tuesday, November 16.
For photos of ST21 Glasgow, visit the ‘gallery‘ part of our website. ST returns to the same venue in Glasgow, the Hilton Hotel in William Street downtown, on April 26. For the rest of the 2022 dates and venues – including a first ST in Wales, in Cardiff – visit the Security TWENTY part of the website. ST events are free to attend whatever your interest in the private security industry, whether as security manager, installer or consultant.
ST chair
Standing in at short notice as chair of the ST21 Glasgow conference was Stuart Galloway. His background is in manned services sector after serving as a Senior Non-Commissioned Officer in the Royal Military Police. In the manned sector he worked from the ground floor operations to senior manager and director level positions. Stuart is the Chair of the SIA’s Training Providers Forum and sits on several SIA groups as a member. Stuart is the Security Product Manager for the National Open College Network (NOCN), an educational charity. They were the first to start offering qualifications to security personnel long before licensing requirements for the SIA.
