We go to University College London (UCL) again to talk to deputy security manager Oliver Curran, pictured, now that he’s the chair of the association for university chiefs of security, Aucso, having taken over at Easter from Les Allan of Heriot-Watt University, the host of Aucso’s annual conference. While we were with Ollie we also got up to date on campus security, with the new academic year in mind – more in the September print edition of Professional Security Magazine, Mark Rowe writes.
Ollie arranges to meet us outside the Bloomsbury Theatre, next door to a UCL building that’s a study centre that houses the college’s famous stuffed and preserved philosopher Jeremy Bentham, behind glass. As we wait a young man is speaking to a gathering of about 15 other young people, presumably giving them a tour of the campus as prospective students. Even in midsummer when the students aren’t around – 25,000 new ones are due any week now – the campus is ticking over, and open.
Ollie takes us a back way to an access-controlled staff room (which includes a bar) near the wooden box that used to house Bentham. That could be a metaphor for British universities; they seek to be more visible to the outside world (literally; you can see Bentham, in his glass box, from the street). Meanwhile unis still have to secure what’s precious, whether intellectual property, the people on campus.
While keeping up all Aucso’s relations, such as with related industry bodies such as the National Association for Healthcare Security (NAHS) – Ollie’s an invited speaker at their conference in Birmingham in November – Ollie wants to spread the word about Aucso further. He’s spoken for example to the publication specifically for those working in higher education, the THS – although the online article is like the rest of The Times, behind a paywall.
Ollie’s message is? In a phrase, ‘value not cost’, that you can expect to hear more of at the Aucso Easter 2024 conference in Liverpool – Aucso’s 40th anniversary. Ollie suggests that you aren’t doing your job as a security manager, if you aren’t promoting the value of security – ways that a guard force or an office of security specialists and practitioners save money. It’s a message that has wider application than on campuses.
Ollie’s a former chair of the Aucso London region – the association besides gathering online has regional in-person meetings, and Ollie hopes to get around some – and a board member of the umbrella group, the Security Commonwealth.
As mentioned in the August print edition, Ollie has already flown the flag for Aucso, going to Sydney for a gathering of Aucso’s Australian members; and to the annual conference of Iaclea, the US-based campus security and policing association. Campus security in the States looking more like uniformed – and armed – police to a British eye, although Ollie and other Brits who have been abroad will tell you that the security and crime issues in one country are much the same in another – or if a sort of crime is not in your country now, it will be in a few years.
Plenty of good work goes on around campuses to deter and prevent crime; campus security was well represented in this years UK OSPAs; and Les Allen – whose work at Heriot-Watt means having to travel regularly to the uni’s sites on other continents – got honoured with an award at the at INTERSEC event in January in Dubai.
Campus security, then, has a more international, certainly across the English-speaking world, feel than some other sectors of security. Change in academia has been great in recent years – whereas academics might cross continents, now students do too; unis are in a global market. Not only does the greater numbers of students from abroad bring risks (those new to a country, let alone their home city, while unfamiliar with customs may be a target for criminals), that’s among the drivers to a markedly more welfare and safeguarding feel to campus security, as first responders (and perhaps only responders, Ollie notes). Meanwhile campus guard forces still do the routine (and often unseen) tasks of locking and unlocking doors and buildings.
