The October 2024 edition of Professional Security Magazine is now landing through letterboxes and (the electronic, flip-page version) into email in-boxes. We begin a three-part (at least!) series on business crime partnerships. While partnership is a word much bandied around, and honoured more than actually paid for, wherever you look – cities, small or seaside towns – the answer to the problems that you see more or less everywhere – shop theft, drug-dealing and antisocial behaviour on-street, nuisances that may be ‘low level’ to the authorities but are enough to put off shoppers – lie in businesses, the police and other agencies pooling their knowledge, for the benefit of all.
We took a train (or two) to Gravesend, in Kent, to see the home patch of Sophie Jordan, who’s also the manager of the NABCP (National Association of Business Crime Partnerships), whose conference we attended and featured late last year; and hear about the work done to protect the day and night-time economies.
We also feature words and pictures from the ever more popular Women in Security (WiS) awards dinner – click here for a gallery of photos of the night; process serving as the latest in our series about private security sector jobs; the event security and stewarding of the Taylor Swift concerts at Wembley in August, as part of the American singing phenomenon’s epic Eras tour; and ask if drones are more of a solution in search of a problem than a tool of use to the guarding sector at least. We meet Paul Lawton-Jones again, of Mercury Training, who (over the best porridge in Birmingham) talks us through the Professional Security Operative (PSO) apprenticeship. You may think that in the security industry, apprenticeships are only for alarm installers; Paul explains that apprenticeships are part of the wider work towards professionalising the sector, and an apprentice need not be an 18-year-old school-leaver (18 is the minimum age you can be SIA-badged) but can be someone of any age, who’s starting as a security officer.
Plus fraud; ‘health on the high street’ as explained by Mike Lees CSyP of Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust; the Grenfell Tower fire inquiry report; the state of prisons; magazine MD Roy Cooper’s gossip page for installers, manufacturers and distributors; four pages of ‘spending the budget’, and new products and services; and a book review page.
If you’d like to take a look at a print copy of the magazine with a view to subscribing (one year costs £40) – email your name and postal address to [email protected]. To freely read the digital version of the magazine, and past editions, visit the ‘magazine‘ part of the website.
Photo by Mark Rowe; Wembley Stadium, showing the extra layer of physical security installed recently as part of the remedies to the mass gate-crashing of the stadium at the Euros final between England and Italy in summer 2021.
