The latest edition of Professional Security Magazine, for September 2025, includes a timely interview (as students prepare to return to campus, or start as undergraduates at university), with Geoff Brown, the chair of the university security managers’ association Aucso and the Head of Community Safety and Campus Security at the University of Leeds. Not for the first time, we heard how varied the work of campus security is – and demanding, given that the Leeds campus (like many others) is deliberately permeable and host to students and staff by the tens of thousands.
That, and Geoff’s job title, begs the question of what a security department on campus is there for, and what it ought to look like – is it like the police, there to keep the peace and detain wrong-doers; or, more of a service, to look after the wider welfare of students, who are after all paying customers at the institution, in a competitive market?
Professional Security prides itself on getting around the UK; this month we report from Birmingham city centre, seeing for ourselves what Birmingham City Council set out to its councillors recently as it moved towards making public space protection orders (PSPOs) to combat noise and other nuisances in the main shopping streets, such as illegal street traders. One year on from our major series on retail crime reduction partnerships, we return to the subject, and bring you word from two business improvement districts (BIDs): Guildford in Surrey, and London Bridge, that take different approaches to patrolling the public space.
Also featured are corporate security intelligence; the phenomenally successful Oasis concerts at Heaton Park in Manchester – so successful that they spawned crowds outside the concerts’ temporary perimeter; how a case of ‘don’t you know who I am?!’ can cause a sudden problem for gate stewards; and a call for a new ‘taxonomy’ to ginger up recruitment into the cyber security sector. Plus regulars such as Magazine MD Roy Cooper’s page of gossip about and for installers, distributors and manufacturers of products; and four pages of ‘spending the budget’.
If you’d like to subscribe to the magazine – it starts at £40 for one year – visit the magazine website; you can email your name and postal address to [email protected] and request a trial copy. You can view past editions freely via the ‘magazine‘ part of the website.
The October edition will include more on retail crime reduction; and a game of fourth tier English football.
Photo by Mark Rowe: steward, Somerset cricket ground, Taunton.
