Una Riley spoke to Prof Martin Gill in our May 2003 edition. More than two years now into his consultancy, Perpetuity, Mark Rowe dropped into his Leicester office.
Deliberately, Prof Martin Gill has set about putting his feet in both camps – the academic and the business worlds. He’s a professor of criminology at the University of Leicester; and his consultancy Perpetuity is in a building in that university’s part of the city. Inside a bookish first floor room, sitting on low chairs, in front of a bay window, it is indeed a leafy, red-brick university setting. But Prof Gill and colleagues Dr Tim Pascoe (recruited from the Building Research Establishment) and Doug Smith (head of Perpetuity’s security and risk group) explain that they are about research and consultancy. For example, Martin Gill has talked to offenders, such as robbers. This was the cornerstone of books such as Commercial Robbery, and his inaugural lecture as a professor in February 2003. It is something that does cause raised eyebrows among some security folk. Martin Gill says: “Our main task is to provide solutions that people can use. We have a wide variety of people with different skills in the world of security and risk management; what we are looking to do is provide evidence-based solutions which are based on a body of knowledge which can then be used to improve practices.” Maybe a client wants just the research; maybe it wants the knowledge to do something about, say, shop theft. Or what makes for effective security guards. And what works in one place may not work elsewhere. The effectiveness might be thanks to a dynamic leader, who knows what they are doing and who has driven a project. Or it may be that a security measure did not work because there was not a problem in the first place!
The aim then is to measure, to work with the client, whether it is surveying or brain-storming. No more hearsay. We have been talking about things you can quantify, though. Robberies. How to measure qualitative things, such as customer service? The service to the customer may be intangible – a smile, a reassuring presence, a recognised face. As added value, it plainly matters to security providers, like providers of any service. While not wishing to single any company out, Reliance Security for example has as its slogan ‘The Reliance Difference’.
Well, Perpetuity reply, taking customer service: is it even part of the remit, the contract, the job description? Are staff trained in customer service? Here can lie the confusion between what was in the buyer’s mind and what happens on the ground. And there are things that can be evaluated: do staff arrive on time, do they speak English? Dr Tim Pascoe suggests the guarding equivalent of the ‘mystery shopper’ testing a retailer for service.
Perpetuity adds that it has developed a risk model for managing crime in an organisation, such as managing bank robberies. The consultancy offers risk assessments, and has a community safety arm that offers crime and disorder, and substance misuse, audits for crime and disorder partnerships and others. As Dr Tim Pascoe points out, learning about illegal drugs markets (used by offenders such as shop thieves) can be of use to businesses, such as retailers.
