The patrolling of public places by business improvement district (BID) officers – whose routines look very much like ‘bobbies on the beat’ – features in the July edition of Professional Security Magazine. Mark Rowe gives a taste.
As you would expect from a protest march calling for a law to place a legal responsibility on premises to take security measures to counter terrorism, the final leg of Figen Murray’s walk to Downing Street on Wednesday, the seventh anniversary of the May 22, 2017 Manchester Arena terror attack, was well marshalled, by police and FGH Security. I wonder however how many of the 100 or more well-wishers who gathered at Marble Arch before the 9am start noticed the Marble Arch BID’s Street Team officer, pictured? His presence under an umbrella was the essence of security and policing; he did not interfere or even make himself known; meaning that those passing through Marble Arch and the nearby London Underground station had no cause to notice him.
That does not mean that a uniformed on-street presence by BIDs is unnecessary. Quite the opposite; when BIDs ask businesses in their area what matters, security ranks first or second, whether the BID covers a town or big-city retail high street, or a more mixed business district.
BIDs matter, if only because if you are a business in a BID area, you have no choice about being levied towards the BID’s budget to do things – besides typically an on-street presence, other things that add to public services, whether cleaning or other ‘street management’, hanging baskets, marketing or events. The sums add up nationally – very roughly the UK has 350 BIDs, and the largest such as in London’s West End are considerable, seven figures a year, affairs (FGH have the contract to patrol the West End).
However, security work for BIDs remains no more than a niche market. Partly because of the relatively low numbers. Compared with the roughly 430,000 SIA-badged officers in the UK, those 350 BIDs will have, I would guess, a total of security patrollers in the very low four figures. The smaller BIDs will have one or two, or none. An excuse for my guess is around the definition of patroller – significantly, many BIDs do not term their patrollers ‘security’ but wardens or rangers; or (with a nod to the police?) community support officers. Besides, BIDs may employ ‘ambassadors’ who are there to ‘meet and greet’, and give directions; and roving patrollers whose task is to spot and log issues with the streetscene, such as street furniture needing repair. They serve as extra pairs of ‘eyes and ears’ that can be of aid to community safety, but would leave incidents to the trained, experienced security-patrollers.
Which leads me to an important working group by the BID Foundation, an arm of the Institute of Place Management. The BID Foundation has four working groups; ‘safe and secure‘ is one. It has 20 members; nine are female. They work for a variety of BIDs. Some are in London, such as Karol Doherty of We Are Waterloo, featured in the April edition of Professional Security; and indeed Steve Lewis, the business security and resilience manager of Marble Arch BID. Besides Paul Street, now of Colmore BID in Birmingham city centre, featured in Professional Security in 2018 when he was working for the Soho Road BID in suburban Birmingham; and similar security and business crime reduction managers in BIDs in big cities such as Bristol; cathedral cities such as Canterbury and Worcester; and market towns such as Skipton, in Yorkshire.
Among that group’s important work is codifying of the job of public place security patroller. As for training, such a patroller typically goes far beyond the ‘bog standard’ (to use one manager’s term) SIA licence requirements. Some of the extras may be the UK official counter-terror awareness ACT, and SCaN for awareness of suspicious behaviour; FAST first aid training (the ST stands for ‘severe trauma’); mental health first aid awareness; conflict resolution; customer service; and as an ‘active bystander’ being aware of and challenging sexual harassment.The codifying work is also about setting out what qualities of integrity a patroller should have.
Typically patrollers are coming across rough sleepers in doorways; in winter, who does not pass an unmoving rough sleeper under a rucksack and wonder, are they alive? A patroller’s role is as much about welfare as security or safety. Yes, the patroller’s task may be to move on a rough sleeper so that a key-holder opening their shop in the morning midwinter dark does not encounter a rough sleeper in their doorway or fire exit. That homeless person is however human, to be treated with compassion. It’s all a far cry from the door security of 20 years before when the SIA badging regime came in, of door staff refusing entry and ejecting.
British Transport Police (BTP) officers at rail stations are doing similar tasks, although the police’s national ‘right person, right care‘ policy does seek to pass responsibility for those causing a non-criminal disturbance onto the medics. The reality after the public sector austerity of the 2010s is that the UK generally has a police service more like fire brigades, able to deploy in numbers when truly needed, but routinely dashing from fire to fire without the personnel to deliver more than an occasional presence in neighbourhoods (such as on ‘operations’ to go after this crime or nuisance or that). Hence the call for BID patrollers and that they – like door and other security staff – are often first responders, whether to a medical emergency or crime, or both (after a stabbing; patrollers may also be trained in use of defibrillators).
Yet more intriguing in what has for years been a mixed economy of policing of town and city centre public space is whether and how these BID patrollers and the police are sharing 999 cases; whether the patroller is called by a BID business to a scene, and the patroller escalates an incident to a 999 requiring police with arrest powers; or police draw on the patrollers when an incident de-escalates, or police leave something to the patrollers entirely. If the 2024 election campaign throws up politicians talking about ‘law and order’ in terms solely of more police officers, that will be so cliched and simplistic as to be comic, or insulting to the electorate.
For the seemingly fixed reality is that far more crimes and incidents are happening than the 999 and public services can handle, if only because besides what we might call the ‘kinetic’ incidents (a traffic accident, a street robbery), BID patrollers are also gathering info about, for example, county lines drug dealer recruitment of drug-runners, that requires lengthy gathering of evidence. Again, those BID patrollers may well be the ‘eyes and ears’. Hence the importance of that BID Foundation working group, to bring consistency across BIDs, so that any BID doesn’t have to re-invent wheels.
