New on your desk: the October print issue of Professional Security Magazine. Below, editor Mark Rowe’s introductory editorial.
A couple of things I am working on for next month’s magazine are at the two extremes of the scale, if you like.
Last month I went for the first time to a conference that brought together professors and other thinking people, with phrases flying around like ‘critical infrastructure’ and ‘organisational culture’. Strategic and high stuff. Say if your employer is a maker of cars and they decide to make only diesels, the security bit comes in if energy supplies in the next few decades become so less secure that it’s a bad business move. At the other extreme, you have the new eighth edition of Security Manual, published by Gower (www.gowerpub.com). It’s a (so the back cover says) ‘ready-made source of information for all members of the security profession’.
Basic things: searching, moving cash, patrolling, standing on doors. The two extremes, the corporate suit and the man on the gate, do not really mix. Except that they do. Take the story – you will have to wait next time for the full story – on 7-7 when a relief officer, told to evacuate the building, pressed the fire alarm. It’s one way of doing it.
Which brings me to what is in this month’s magazine. I was invited to the launch of an on-line refresher learning package for security officers who have gone through the day of Project Griffin counter-terrorist training. While everyone spoke well of Griffin (page 39) and all credit must go to the security trainers and managers and others who have made Griffin happen, I did leave wondering if the authorities would give the same co-operation to combat, say, corporate fraud.
If ever you wonder, what’s the point of saying something, no-one takes any notice – and I do wonder – allow me to point to Ian Paton, the former police man now head of security at Focus DIY. Indeed he does take a do-it-yourself approach. It was he who stood up at the SIA-Changing Agenda conference and said something that many people grumble about but most shrug at, as one of those things: the security officer who has a SIA badge but cannot read or make himself understood in English. And the SIA for one have remembered hearing it. Ian is a regular invited speaker at conferences to do with retail loss prevention, which is where I last saw him. And it does no harm to say you can hear him in London on October 10 at the eyeforretail event (www.eyeforretail.com).
Anyway, he’s in the magazine (page 58) about tackling online fraud – interesting that he is taking an interest in a field that, as he says, is seen as one for technical guys.
What else. One trick of the magazine trade is that if you keep quiet about something, you can hope that no-one will notice. That is how I felt last issue when, for the first time as long as I can remember, which varies, there was no book review. I have tried to make up this time with two long reviews (pages 68, 71). One about policing public disorder, one about ‘managing knowledge security’. That takes us back to the start, the extremes of 1) strategic planning, and 2) the day to day routine and sometimes confrontational work of an officer. With the SIA approved contractor scheme (page 46) in mind too, I have been talking more lately to guarding people (page 80 for instance).
