How rare it is that you see on television, whatever the channel, working men or women talking about what they do. How much rarer it is to hear anyone from private security. Usually the documentaries following workers are from the emergency services. Shoplifters: at War with the Law is running for a second series on Channel 5, and in that sense of telling the rest of us about working people is public service broadcasting, writes Mark Rowe.
In other senses it is formulaic; we get some narrative about the security staff at West Orchards shopping centre in downtown Coventry (pictured), then something else about TM-Eye, the private security company founded by David McKelvey, at work in Ealing and London’s West End, and then back again, because viewers can’t concentrate on the same thing for longer than a few minutes.
The title isn’t completely accurate; what the hour-long episodes show is not only theft from shops, but any crime or wrong-doing. In last night’s episode, West Orchards’ SIA-badged, black-uniformed, radio-carrying and body-camera-wearing security officers were alerted to a man making (as on the day before) sexual and suggestive remarks to girls. When Security asked him about his behaviour, he called it banter; although evidently those who had reported him felt otherwise.
In that case besides Coventry BID (business improvement district) patrollers in their pale blue bibs, and SIA-badged, a PCSO on a bicycle arrived on the scene. The man who’d made the inappropriate remarks made some more, to the law enforcers. “Because I’m in the mood, right,” he said aggressively. “I am taking you out first, then him, then him.” The man was left to the police, and security staff duly moved away. One of the security officers commented: “We know what he looks like now, just a case of monitoring it every time he comes in.”
What the documentary didn’t do was analyse. While that may be good, to let us draw our own conclusions, and there’s only so much TV can put across in an hour, the BID didn’t get explained, nor the new mixed economy of policing of high streets and city centres – that only ever sees a police officer (with arrest powers unlike a PCSO) once in a while (on a ‘day of action’) or if something major is confirmed to have happened. The BID wardens or ambassadors or whatever they are termed mean that businesses are paying twice for public space protection. The private security of that mix, the documentary did suggest in a rare piece of editorialising was almost a ‘fourth emergency service’, which appeared to overlook HM Coastguard.
That idea of a ‘fourth emergency service’ got aired in the November print edition of Professional Security Magazine, when a panel at the recent Emergency Services Show at the Birmingham NEC picked holes in it – if it’s so, where’s the agreed protocols with police, training and equipment, consistency across towns and police forces?
The documentary did show the sheer oddity and low-fidelity of some of the criminals and neer-do-wells that the West Orchards and doubtless other shopping malls come across. As one security officer said towards the end of the hour: “We get all the excuses under the sun thrown at us. We have heard it all before.” Such as the man who took his bicycle into a branch of Vision Express and was followed on the mall’s CCTV cameras and in person by mall security. As he was escorted out, he said to the officers that he hadn’t thieved for nine years. As the officer retorted, no-one had said he was a thief.
The documentary also showed one flare-up of violence, nothing to do with shoplifting, and indeed not to do with West Orchards at all; a traffic warden had happened to give a ticket to a man outside a shop, who took offence and the two spilled inside the mall. The centre’s control room directed a patroller to the entrance where the two were. We followed the officer taking the escalators down to the ground floor while the ticketed man pushed the traffic warden against a shop window and grabbed his jacket.
Further officers arrived, and we saw and were told of the various tactics to defuse such a situation. “You know what happened, just calm down, we can sort this out, and get you gone.” It was striking that those in uniform including the assaulted warden were inclined to make as little of such incidents as they could, whether because it would only mean more work for them to report matters to the authorities or because it wouldn’t be worth it. The warden said that he was happy enough, once the ticketed man became calm, to report it through 101 (time consuming in itself) and to let the man go. As a security officer reflected of the man who made the assault: “Just an unhappy customer.”
Another officer commented of more violence shown towards staff; punches thrown, spitting, and verbal abuse. “Physical violence these days is becoming more and more, and less and less is getting done about it.” Perhaps, we were left to conclude for ourselves, the two are connected.
