The last thing you are taught is the first thing you forget, is something I remember that the England football coach of the 1990s, Terry Venables, said; writes Mark Rowe.
I would put that another way: what you learn at the outset of a job, or in a line of work, sticks with you. That may be the geography of a site, if you are a patrolling security officer or a control room operator. Because everything is new, somehow it sticks in the memory, even the never to be repeated sweaty smell of anxiety that you carried around, as you ‘learned the ropes’ (as they once had to in the Royal Navy). You learn to perform the job, competently; and, more subtly, the attitudes that come with the job, towards colleagues and (if your peers see work as ‘us and them’) customers and employers – what to think about them (maybe not as polite as you are to their face), who (if anyone) to trust. Besides the job spec, then, you pick up the occupational, or ‘canteen culture’, in the days when employers invested in canteens. Given that so many workplaces in the public and private sector alike have been revealed as toxic, it’s surprising that culture is – while less obvious than what badge someone is wearing – so little investigated.
Having begun with the private security industry in what turned out to be its last years before IP (Internet Protocol) networks came in, I learned that security was the physical (locks, gates, fences), personnel (vetting of staff), and electronic (a trinity of intruder or burglar alarms, access control, and CCTV).
Two unconnected conversations have prompted me to remark that that trinity is no longer valid – so much so, it needs unlearning. The market has long been saturated with access control, video cameras and above all intruder alarms. If a shop or a campus library is open 24-hours, does it need intruder alarms – are they only a potential source of false alarms? The very term CCTV is no longer accurate, as they are not closed circuits more, and television – so powerful culturally in the later 20th century – has been overtaken by audio and video on the internet. Oddly, if a residential area suffers crime such as fly-tipping, the call invariably whether from residents or their local councillors is for more, or some, video surveillance. This continued popularity of surveillance cameras may only arise because it serves as a way of showing that something, visibly, is being done, rather than expecting criminals to be deterred or detected and brought to justice, or at least displaced (to somewhere not with cameras).
Among the findings of the Manchester Arena Inquiry was that the venue had ‘grey space’ not covered by the Arena’s video cameras, where the suicide bomber was able to linger on Monday evening, May 22, 2017. That has been among the security learnings; to seek to close any gaps in the surveillance, to deny criminals a place they aren’t surveilled. However surely the point is that the bomber with his unusually, suspiciously large and visibly heavy backpack took it through the city, and into Victoria rail station and outside the Arena, all (like any city in the UK) well covered with video surveillance, yet the bomber carried out his ‘hostile reconnaissance’ and was not delayed, deterred or displaced; quite apart from the failings of the police on duty, as the Inquiry analysed and as police apologised for after the Inquiry published its volume two findings last year.
The proposed Protect Duty as recommended by the Inquiry may prompt – so vendors will hope – more specifying of and spend on alarms, access control and video cameras, and kit in general, to comply with the Duty. But has spending on that trinity become a mere habit, or something done because insurers demand it (because of insurance companies’ habit)? The wearing of identity cards in our lifetime has become ever more the norm, at schools. That serves to socialise the young into accepting that they will be expected to wear such ID as working adults; but does anybody check the badge? Security officers in corporate foyers are there to give customer service, to let in the authorised, besides keep out the unauthorised – is an officer really going to challenge anyone, that their face doesn’t look like their photo, or to ask for proof that their name is what it says on the card? Is an officer even going to get close enough to the card to get a good look at the photo – if a woman’s ID is on a lanyard at navel level, it might look as if the officer is staring at her boobs – is the officer going to risk doing that, if he wants to stay in his job?
The largest surveillance product manufacturers, the likes of Hikvision, Dahua and Bosch, have been developing as speedily as they can into the Internet of Things (IoT). Hikvision for example has gone from making video surveillance products for others to label, to doing so under its own name, to diversifying to access control and intercoms, and acquired the UK manufacturer of alarm panels Pyronix. It and its rivals have each been responding to the move to ‘smart’, or ‘connected’ buildings and entire cities. Whatever you call the IoT, it’s about sensors, whether they measure the temperature of a fish tank or fridges, who’s entered a room – which can trigger the switching on of lights and air-conditioning and the raising of blinds – which is all about data, which is the ‘smart’ bit, whether you use the data on room occupancy to reduce your office estate, or the data from on-street cameras to change the on and off of traffic lights for better traffic flow. As business and civic users of IoT can do more, surveillance for security seems relatively less impressive.
As for the storage of surveillance data, look where the fastest-growing and pioneering companies are going, such as Apple, and Amazon. The potential market for data centres is huge, and dwarfs your network or digital recorder of a generation ago. Again, the use of data centres for surveillance is puny compared to all the other uses. Do you want to keep to on-premises storage of surveillance camera footage that could be ruined by flood or fire, or stolen in a break-in, let alone after the covid pandemic lockdown when you might not be able to access the recordings?
One of the conversations was with a security man who has done so well that it’s wise to listen to whatever he says. In installations for corporates, he is now talking with access app developers. For a business in a tenanted building, access is something you can do with your phone, the same as you use an app to book a room, an appointment in the building’s gym or restaurant (or why leave your desk at all, there’s apps for ordering food delivered to you), or to answer your home doorbell and to view the entrance camera to check that the delivery driver does drop off the package when you remotely unlock the door, and doesn’t walk out with a vase. Given consumers have lapped up that so much can be app-based and convenient, Security cannot stand apart. Besides, non-security people have always been the ones often setting and unsetting the workplace intruder alarm (and causing false alarms, the bane of the security industry and police for decades, having literally millions of false alarms to sift through for the fraction of genuine ones).
For nigh on 20 years the electronic security industry has faced the spectre of being taken over by the far larger tech sector. If it hasn’t happened, it may only be because to the likes of Amazon, the home market for its Ring doorbells is so enormous, the market for corporate access control isn’t worth the trouble.
Consider that the big research and development efforts are into autonomous, driver-less cars, and artificial intelligence; because there lie the greatest potential market and profits, and never mind the risk that reducing humanity to the status of pandas in zoos. Far less R&D is going into something that would, indisputably, do more good for humanity: exoskeletons, that would be worn by workers, including on security patrols, doing physical, repetitive tasks that cause back and other pain.
