Policing, organised crime and criminal investigations are the subjects of past, present and future books by Alan Wright. So they were the natural topics when Professional Security visited the former senior police officer turned academic’s home.
Alan Wright retired in 1985 as a Metropolitan Police chief superintendent. His second, academic career began, first at the Henry Fielding Centre, named after one of the fathers of British policing, founder of the Bow Street Runners, which is still going (the centre, that is, not the Runners) at the University of Manchester. Alan Wright worked for a year in private security for retailer Safeway, as a security analyst, in charge of the in-house alarm monitoring (in Gateshead) and in charge of headquarters security (at Hayes). He recalls he did 60,000 miles driving that year. He went to Staffordshire University, where he did European Union-funded work for the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior, about policing, in the days when Hungary was seeking to join the EU. In 1998 he went to the Institute of Criminal Justice Studies, at the University of Portsmouth. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at Keele University, though having passed 60 he sought to retire from full-time academic work and do more writing. His books, published by Willan are Policing: an introduction to concepts and practice (2001) – he is working on the second edition – Organised Crime (2006) and, planned for the autumn, he is one of the editors of a Handbook of Criminal Investigation.
Policing, then, first. His new edition will try to bring the story up to date, taking in the Police Reform Act (2002), the Menezes shooting last year, community support officers. Of relevance from the private security angle is the community safety accreditation, as laid out in the Police Reform Act. Briefly, a security force can apply for accreditation from police. Alan Wright says: "I think it’s highly likely that accreditation will continue to move forward, so eventually you will have police licensed investigators, but other police officers will not be, but will be accredited to do other things. And I think that’s something which appears in medicine, in all kinds of fields, now; where people have to be accredited, and demonstrate their competencies in particular fields. It’s going to apply to policing, and to security – well, it already is applying to security. I think it will happen to most of the public sector, eventually. It’s about tying skills into competencies, and training, which I think is a good thing."
While Alan does not claim to be an expert in private security, it was stimulating to take the wider view. For instance, there are not only police who are investigators, but investigators in the military, Secret Service, private security, insurance … and they do not have the same range of skills. And what if they want to work for a body that does investigations? There has to be some way for job-seekers to show they are competent.
Next: the Handbook of Criminal Investigation, which if it is like previous handbooks by Willan, is the kind of door-stopper that you don’t want to drop on your toe. Alan Wright stresses that it is a book of theory, not only about what is going on out there, but why investigations happen the way they do, the theory behind it. Hence chapters about psychology, the ‘legal context’, forensic science, interviewing … Alan Wright is to write a chapter on ‘ethics and corruption’. Putting it another way, the moral dilemmas that investigators come up against. Alan Wright describes those dilemmas from the point of view of police officers, but they crop up among private investigators also. The investigators are not bad, or evil people. Rather, there are often moral dilemmas in the background, Alan Wright says. The investigator is trying to satisfy conflicting demands – the need to satisfy justice, and the employer, the private company’s demand, for whatever the company’s policy is. For instance, the bottom line for the company may be not to see that justice is done in a court in cases of wrong-doing, but that the company is profitable and stays in business. What if, for instance, a company director is a good employee, an entrepreneurial character, yet thought it was right to take money out of the company, through expenses fraud? The company then has a dilemma; does it sweep the fraud under the carpet? Sack the man – who may well be given a job by another company, because of his work qualities? Other dilemmas, Alan Wright adds, come in product contamination; and kidnap and ransom of executives. Does the company give in to blackmail? There is not enough research on this subject to do with the security industry, Alan Wright says.
As for his new book, about organised crime, only one of the nine chapters is about the tackling of such crime. Most of the book, then, is given over to what organised crime is, and trends within such crime. There is organised crime, he points out, and there are attempted moves of such criminal business into the legitimate economy. That is, efforts to turn ‘dirty money’ into clean money, that the organised criminals are happy to pay tax on, because such legitimate business is a source of constant income for the criminal. This is not new; think of the Elizabethan sea captains like Drake, who were pirates plundering the Spanish or agents of the Tudor state, depending on your point of view.
The Tudors crop up because in the room are many pewter plates – the oldest dating from 1570 – and, above the mantlepiece, Holbein reproductions and a portrait of Henry VIII. A grandfather clock ticks in a corner. There’s a big rug on the floor, a wooden beam running along the ceiling, old-looking books in a bookcase. A far cry, then, from what is trans-national, organised crime today. What is organised crime, exactly though? Because almost any crime has to be organised – a robber needs to organise a driver, and a car, beforehand. Alan Wright answers in terms of the characteristics – how durable is the crime, is the gang enforcing discipline through violence. And he speaks of two key areas – the (illegal) drugs industry; and what he calls ‘enterprise crime’, that is, ‘dirty business’ – not sewage, but trade and manufacture of goods. To take the 2006 World Cup, if someone places an order for the manufacture of counterfeit football shirts in Asia, has them shipped, and sold in markets. As Alan Wright notes, the counterfeit business has been around for a long time, everything from Rolex watches to perfume to olive oil (in one case, olive oil that was actually toxic). Enterprise crime is a matter of shades of grey, he suggests; it’s a kind of enterprise, that mirrors something that is legitimate. To stay with the football shirt example: it’s legitimate for Nike or some other company to trademark their design; it has legal status. The counterfeit maker and seller of a T-shirt that looks like the Nike one (or whatever brand) has crossed a legal boundary. There are other aspects to organised crime, Alan Wright adds: is it accompanied by some kind of coercion, or violence? How do the organised criminals defend their product, or deal with rivals?
Is where private security comes in, Professional Security asks, that a legitimate company may use a counterfeit product, become caught up with organised crime, unless it carries out due diligence? Alan Wright prefers to point to the issue of security in emerging countries (the former Soviet bloc, say). "I think there is a big security issue about companies setting up in other states, where contracts are difficult to enforce. If you set up a company abroad, and someone reneges on something and you say, oh well, I will go down to the court and I will sue them for the money. And then you go to the court and you find the contract for a variety of reasons, sometimes legal, are not actionable. You need your money back." How then do you enforce the contract? By employing someone risky?
"The other area is the actual security and protection of the business that is operating in that particular state, especially if you think the state itself might be corrupt and you cannot rely on the state to do anything for you, if it all goes wrong." That is, a multi-national builds a factory; and one day the mafia knocks on the door, and says, we provide the security around here. And if the company says no, workers don’t come in to work any more. What do you do? It’s damage limitation then, Alan Wright suggests. Another problem – say you have that factory in eastern Europe, or further away, producing something for the UK – is the sheer theft by criminals on the supply chain. Alan Wright ends with another moral dilemma, between police and security (and many in private security have a police background). Justice, to repeat, is necessarily not the first consideration for a security person; company profitability comes first. For instance, if lorry drivers are doing fraud by allowing their lorries’ new tyres to be swapped for old ones. The security manager may wish to catch and punish some offenders, but the transport manager may have a different point of view – if Security does that, all the drivers will go out on strike! A way around that: bonded lorry drivers, so that the risk is transferred.
