Now landing on desks and in email in-boxes is the June 2024 edition of Professional Security Magazine. As ever we’ve been around the UK to keep you in touch with what’s going on in private security.
We report further from the Easter, 40th anniversary annual conference of campus security managers, Aucso, in particular about how three female security managers have worked to change the approach and look of their departments, which can include a new name – such as, to community safety, or safeguarding, to reflect that security management at universities has become not only, or even largely, a physical security matter of protecting, and locking and unlocking buildings and rooms, but looking to the welfare and well-being of students.
We were in Northamptonshire for the annual gathering of the CCTV User Group, which served as a chance for us to take the temperature of local government public space CCTV. Thanks to the Home Office’s Safer Street Fund, and other sources of central Government money, councils are better placed than they have been for 20 years, to find ways to renew their kit. But money is as tight as ever; how do CCTV and control room managers succeed in making ends meet, and convincing councillors and the public that public space CCTV is worth having?
Turning to guarding, we bring you a recent debate on the ‘real living wage’, featuring senior figures from three contract guarding firms that are banging the drum for the movement organised by the Living Wage Foundation. The main feature is retail security and loss prevention – while the UK Government has set out a retail crime ‘action plan’ which has been widely welcomed by retail and the private security sector, retailers are still struggling to manage violence and aggression against staff. We report numerous examples over five pages.
Also featured are open source intelligence (osint) as a way of getting ahead of what could be otherwise costlier and messier risks such as site protest and car cruisers; and regulars such as magazine MD Roy Cooper’s page of gossip for and about installers, manufacturers and distributors.
If you’d like to take a look at a print edition of Professional Security Magazine with a view to subscribing, email your name and postal address to [email protected]. You can read each month’s as a ‘page flip’ read on the ‘magazine‘ part of this website.
Photo by Mark Rowe: CCTV in Cambridge city centre, summer 2023. See page 32 of the June 2024 edition.
