From our October print edition: we featured SOE Academy, a new security and anti-terrorism training firm, in January.
The trainers have since set up at the Fire Service College, and held an open day in August. Mark Rowe drove to the Cotswolds to see the set-up for CCTV operator training. First, an interview with the chief exec.
Nikki Heath recalls how she was staying at a London hotel on the evening of July 7. She recalls concrete barriers around the car park to prevent taxis and potential vehicle bombs at bay. Inside the hotel were ‘men in black’ with walkie-talkies; and she like other guests were met with men making metal-detection searches with ‘wizard wands’. And everyone had to have their bags searched. Nikki’s verdict: “But it wasn’t actually that effective, because they weren’t doing a good job and people were starting to get irritated.” With reason, as the queue of people with their baggage waiting to get into the hotel was snaking outside – into the rain. As Nikki said, introducing the topic of hotels, there are security issues yet meanwhile a hotel wants to maintain a friendly front; for the sake of its brand, perhaps. Take the case of some hotels where an access control card issued by reception works the lifts to floors with rooms. However, there is the risk in business generally of tail-gating – that British wish to be polite and hold a door open for someone.
Subtle but efficient
Security, then, has to be subtle but efficient. Tourists after all want to be comfortable; and besides the question of London trade being affected by 7-7, there are guests pilfering from the hotel, maybe using fraudulent credit cards; intruders pilfering from guests; … Top hotels are a special case, where high net-worth individuals may have their own close protection staff, and wish to take back entrances to avoid attention. (Ian Williamson, former regional security manager for UK and Ireland with Intercontinental Hotels Group, has drawn up SOE’s one-day security course for hotel managers.)
Searching
Nikki mentions cultural issues – body searches may be seen as intrusive by some (Muslim women, for example). Indeed in an update since SOE moved into the Fire Service College near Moreton in the Marsh in February, and began offering courses in April, she speaks of offering security training for receptionists and others in the front-line, who are not necessarily purely security staff. The man here is Rick McConnell, formerly Regional Director of Security for Kraft Foods International, whose talk on risk management at IFSEC 2003 was featured in the July 2003 issue of Professional Security. Security and threat issues at the front of buildings also take in the telephones, another contact point between a business and the outside world. A fraudster may seek to con information out of a business over the ’phone, by ‘social engineering’, to gain enough inside knowledge to do a fraud. Receptionists, too, may be the first person in a building to see activists or other intruders – or decoys. A link here with security officers and CCTV operators is that a front of office person may be doing routine things, and have to react in good time to a developing incident. But, as Nikki adds, if a company has a ‘blame culture’ or is risk-averse – blaming someone for sparking an evacuation – staff may raise the threshold before they raise the alarm about an incident. That may mean that an incident (a robbery, a fire?) is allowed to develop. After 7-7, she adds, the threshold will be low (and indeed the summer saw a rash of false alarms and hoax calls leading to evacuations of public and private buildings, from shopping centres to motorway service stations). SOE Academy staff were keen to point to their Gloucestershire home as central – 90 minutes by train from London Paddington, for example. Certainly the Fire Service College is an interesting place – more fire and rescue vehicles than you can shake a stick at, and overturned vehicles, a burnt-out shell of a building, even a ship, apparently – all for fire training, one should add. As a campus, it scores highly with bars, sports facilities, and catering (halal and vegan … though one wonders how many fire officers are vegetarians).
Who was there
Among visitors on the open day were security managers such as Chris Beaman (University of Portsmouth) and guarding company people such as Greg North (The Shield), Mark Cartwright (UK Guarding Services, of Leicester) and Michael Lee, MD of Constant Security Services, who joked that he was showing his age by stepping in for his daughter. This may suggest how contract guarding firms are offering CCTV monitoring, or are looking to move into monitoring, if SIA licences for contract guards make gatehouse-guards-on-seats scarcer and dearer and hence make remote CCTV monitoring more attractive to customers.
Hands-on
Bob Tonkins, head of training, who has a military background, showed visitors around – the 60-seater exam room, for instance (desks the proper distance apart, 1.25m, to combat cheating). The training firm is a City & Guilds, and Edexcel centre (the CCTV operator training is for an Edexcel BTEC level two qualification) and SOE Academy is looking into becoming a STEPS partner with SITO, Bob Tonkins said. CCTV equipment is from manufacturer Vicon, who have installed a control desk with colour monitors and analogue and digital (ViconNet) recording, and a mix of the company’s pan and tilt, static and dome cameras. Vicon worked with consultant Nick Saunders on the control equipment spec; Nick Saunders also wrote the reference manual that each student gets. Derek Pitt, the CCTV trainer, reported that most clients are still using analogue systems, though there is a gradual move towards digital recording. Hence the trainers using both. Jason Blundell of Vicon showed visitors the hands-on part of training – operators first having to follow on one monitor youths in hooded tops kicking a football (badly) around outside, and yet the operator is having to stay alert to spot on another, quad monitor that a man is walking along a line of parked cars suspiciously. Sure enough that man pulls a hammer from under his coat and smashes a car’s back window to steal something. Derek Pitt said that while there is no set minimum time set in the SIA CCTV public space operator qualification for how long an operator should have practical training (put another way, twiddling the joystick), at SOE if a student wants more time to ‘play’ on the equipment, it’s there at lunchtimes and evenings. Each course has eight to 12 students (indeed visitors sat at desks with name badges and paperwork ready for a group from The Corps, starting the next day) and the training company can run up to three courses at once.
A year on
Questions and answers from visitors hinted at two stages of operator training. First, experienced operators who already know, for instance, what telemetry is; and who don’t need to be told what a lens is by a training course set for the lowest common denominator. After a year, however, those taking such training may be novices, who are numerate and literate, who after the four days of training can work in a CCTV control room – under supervision, as the trainers pointed out, likening the operator training to a driving licence: when you pass, that does not necessarily mean you have learned to drive.
Private, public and contract
CCTV managers also have to be alert to the detail of the regulation: from June 2005 all contracted employees operating public space surveillance (PSS) will need to be licensed in CCTV control room operations. Derek Pitt pointed to subtle differences: an operator may one day do private surveillance of a public area; and the next day, public surveillance of a public area. And then there was the visitor to the open day, a new CCTV manager at a shires council who in his words is a ‘professional manager come in to knock heads together’. The council’s control room covers several towns, whose town councils come together in a user group. Quite apart from the sensibilities of each town, the operators are largely volunteers – just to make it more tricky for a council employee, some volunteers are elected councillors. The volunteers are unpaid but get travel expenses. The council has a plan to link this local authority system to a shopping village’s – which is monitored by operators under contract.
SOE Academy are among the most recent trainers approved by the Department for Transport security section (Transec) to train ports and shipping firms to meet the International Ship and Port Facility Security (ISPS) code.
