You can tell someone by the company he keeps. Norman Gibson describes how he came to be a member of The Security Institute, and talks to Mark Rowe about his working life in the police, and offering now security advice, in Northern Ireland.
Norman Gibson went to IFSEC 2007 with the idea of seeing a security industry body he could join. He had left the RUC – the Royal Ulster Constabulary, now the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI); he was one of those who took a ‘Patten package’ as the force changed as part of the peace process. As Norman said – sitting in a corner of the ground floor café in Belfast central library, one of the hundreds of buildings he has security responsibility for – with his RUC title had come credibility. Once in private security – after he left the RUC, he took a fortnight off, then took his current job as security adviser for Belfast Education and Library Board (BELB) – where was he to get such credibility, when dealing as he does with architects and other non-security people to do with buildings? <br><br>About the institute<br><br>"I was looking for a representative body with which to associate myself," Norman says, cappuccino (one sugar) on a low table in front of him. "Now as I walked around IFSEC, what I found was a range of organisations that simply were, ‘give me 25 or 50 quid, and fill in a form’; and my view of that was, if they were that easy to join, anybody could get in. Their credibility meant nothing. And I didn’t want anything to do with them. I walked on to The Security Institute [stand] and speaking with a member of the institute I realised that was an organisation that was different to what I had met around the exhibition." He broke off to smile and say goodbye to a young child and mother leaving the coffee shop. <br><br>Spreading the word<br><br>To return to the institute; it was, as he recalled, not an organisation that was easy to get into; it demanded of entrants. Norman filled in the (extensive) application form, provided evidence of qualifications, organised referees, waited for the membership panel and found he had been awarded membership. Sad to say, few in Ireland, north or south, are members, although numbers are growing, not least because Norman is spreading the word. The aim is to raise enough members for the region to have their own events, as the institute is doing on mainland Britain. "I am disappointed at how little I can be involved with the institute; the geography just doesn’t permit it." So why stay in? Norman returns to the need for credibility. The previous afternoon he was at a school with an access control problem on a new part of the site. It meant meeting people like architects – knowledgeable people, who however have limited knowledge of security. The issue was not only what technology to use, but how to integrate it with other things. Norman takes a piece of biscuit; he has broken it in half, but I have said no to a piece because I am still full from breakfast, am until late afternoon as it happens. A difficulty, he adds, is that such non-security people as architects do not know how little they know. So when Norman explains the security issues around an entrance and exit door, it’s something that may simply never have crossed the architect’s mind. Norman’s aim is to tackle any access or other security measure not on site, but at the design stage, when it’s cheaper. Norman takes another bite of the biscuit and a sip of cappuccino. <br><br>Speak for Ulster/Ireland<br><br>To go back; Norman began by talking of his Christian faith, talking of it as a framework for his day job, and what he does. He is he admits one of those people who would do his job for no money; he talks in terms of commitment, and making a difference. He is comfortable talking about praying – and Northern Ireland is a place where he can expect for such expressions of faith to be heard in comfort. Norman goes on to describe his RUC career; but first it’s as well to describe the present. Northern Ireland is, as Norman puts it, ‘a strange wee place’. He was one of those wise police officers who, if offered a cup of tea while out, never refused it, because you never knew what good might come of the conversation. He tells a story of how as a police officer he attended the house of an old Protestant man who had been the victim of a distraction home burglary. The old man said to Norman, ‘you could speak for Ulster!’ Later, Norman visited an old woman similarly burgled. Again, the woman was hospitable, Norman chatted away, and the woman said, ‘you could speak for Ireland!’ Norman’s point: the old man and woman were very alike, and only living a quarter of a mile apart, but they were a world away from each other. The old man (as shown by his choice of phrase) was unionist, the woman nationalist. <br><br>At peace<br><br>In some ways Belfast and Northern Ireland are new and at peace – it crossed my mind that when Norman first applied for and was turned down for the RUC, in 1980, there were not any places selling cappuccino. The central library, one of the finest Victorian municipal buildings in the country, has colour dome cameras, and plainly like the rest of the city centre has had money spent on it, including copious CCTV. But while the Troubles have officially ended, what you could call the ‘normal’ crime and disorder – graffiti, drug-related theft and drunken anti-social behaviour – do not go away. And there is besides an ignorance from the mainland. The day before meeting Norman, I attended a Retailers Against Crime in Northern Ireland (RACNI) conference (see the separate Retail Security). Over coffee, when I told an English visitor of how on a 1980s visit I (like everyone else) went through football stadium-like turnstiles to enter the central business district, he was surprised. Such was Belfast in those years. Norman’s plain telling of his policing career, then, may need some extra explaining for mainland readers. <br><br>On the beat<br><br>He applied four times to join the RUC, accepted in 1984. In the years 1981-4 he was a full-time reserve, that is, a full-time special, in north Belfast. After a few weeks he was allocated to work with a beat officer, beat officers being in pairs. Unusual, as Norman recalls, for a reserve to spend almost all day on beat duties. "I was 25 and working with officers who had 30, 40 years’ service, and were coming at policing from a very old and traditional background, and in some ways I can see that this influenced everything that I have done since then … just how they operated their beat, communicated with the community, the level of trust that they gave, and the level of trust that they received from their own community was quite special." Come 1984, Norman went into the regulars, and went through training, and went to Donegall Pass station, just south of the city centre. Now as a young man I must have gone past the station while Norman was there. I walked past days after meeting Norman, and it was striking – in a city that has so much shiny new development – that the station (like others throughout the province) was as I recalled it decades before. In a word, like a fortress under siege, with high, high fencing. Simply put, 1980s Irish republican terrorists wanted policemen dead. <br><br>‘I was careful’<br><br>While still a probationer, Norman was given a beat; and qualified as a police motorcyclist, so in the 1980s ‘during some very difficult times’ Norman was riding around Belfast on a motorcycle ‘in high-visibility gear, pulling up alongside Land Rovers, alongside police officers, all heavily armed’. Or, Norman might arrive at a scene without back-up on the way for three, four or five minutes. One day he got a call at home from a senior officer, offering Norman a job in his specialism of crime prevention. Norman recalls that only at the end did the senior officer say where the job would be: west Belfast. Again, Norman did not detail, and mainland readers may not appreciate, the scale of the challenge. Perhaps the quickest way to sketch the area is to say its MP then and now was Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. Norman was four years crime prevention officer for that area, working in civilian clothes and driving his own car. "I don’t mean I was cavalier, I was careful; if I went to a call first thing in the morning, I wouldn’t go to the station first thing." If he was going to a call in the middle of the morning, he would go for a coffee; he would do work on the housing estates in the morning, where trouble would come from cheeky children more than anything; so the children would be at school. In the afternoon he did work at shopping centres and businesses, working with people happy to take police advice, ‘even to the extent of some of the businesses whose money came from fairly dubious sources, and were ex-combatants; but having the same difficulties with crime as anybody else’. Norman recalls some ‘really, really interesting conversations’ with such (not that Norman labels these people) convinced republicans. <br><br>Against forecourt crime<br><br>Norman recalls that a senior officer felt this community work was of such value that she paid his salary while he was ‘lent’ to force headquarters and started some province-wide campaigns, against forecourt crime for example. Filling stations were suffering from drive-offs without paying. It struck Norman how many of the vehicles involved were ‘run-abouts’: that is, used by everybody, without any particular owner. Norman and another officer found other crimes in west Belfast such as off-licence robberies could be tied to such vehicles. What to do? Such cars had no road tax. The Northern Ireland equivalent of the DVLA had the power to clamp all unlicensed vehicles. In the footnotes of the law it said that if there was evidence that the wheel clamp might be damaged or removed, the vehicle could be seized at once, without ever being clamped. So police seized them all; thousands. Drive-off and other crimes fell. So did – and police were not expecting this – traffic accidents. Licensing revenue went up. <br><br>Patten package<br><br>We come to the time of the Patten report into policing in Northern Ireland. Norman was one of those that got a ‘Patten package’ envelope. His instinct, he recalls, was to shred it, he was a sergeant looking to progress to inspector, but as he was turning 50 it would if anything be financially worse if he chose to stay in the force. And so to BELB, which is where he advises on about 300 schools and other buildings in the city. I describe briefly the talk by another ex-policeman at IFSEC on school security (see page 51). Norman agrees with the need to discuss security at the design stage, building in airlocks at entrances, for example, rather than later when the building is done and a security problem shows itself. For Norman the security issues are what you could call low-level, such as habitual damage and trespass, windows broken by youths kicking a football – ‘not a big, but an endemic problem’. He objects to primary schools being designed with multiple – three, four, even eight – entrances. "That becomes very difficult to control." He argues for not several entrances around the perimeter, which yes, is good for letting children out into the open from class; rather, he would prefer turning the inside out, windows and doors facing into a central courtyard, the play area in the centre. Here Norman spoke of Dunblane (the shootings in a Scottish primary school).<br><br>A CCTV realist<br><br>Norman raises CCTV. "I come from a background where at one time I would have described myself as firmly anti-CCTV. I now describe myself as a CCTV realist." He greets by name a woman who has come behind my seat to the coffee shop counter. "CCTV is simply a tool to be used; it is something to be used in the right case. One of the problems I have with the security industry with CCTV is, whenever a sales consultant walks on the site they have an unfortunate habit of making it [CCTV] the first tool." Instead, Norman goes on, you should look at what the problem is, and decide what the best tool is, rather than, and Norman gives a case, of a school being sold a CCTV system when it will not do – access control at the front door – what the school wants it to do. He likens it to financial advisers, suggesting a role for ‘independent security consultants’ with no interest in what (or indeed whether anything) is sold. <br><br>NI and SIA<br><br>Norman touches on the SIA, which, briefly, is meant to bring its licensing regime to Northern Ireland so that all the UK is covered; but there is no public timetable from the SIA or the Northern Ireland Office. Norman recalls being aware in his police days that there was some regulation of private security in Northern Ireland, long before there was an SIA in London. Was NI’s regulation effective? No, he answers; it was more of a tick in the box. But NI finds itself gone from the only region of the UK with at least some regulation of guarding, to the region with the least. "The guarding sector in Northern Ireland is very definitely a low wage economy; the quality of guards who are used clearly indicates that they aren’t being paid enough. The number of hours they are being asked to do clearly indicates how much they have to work to get a living wage, and I would welcome and call for the introduction of the SIA into Northern Ireland, as soon as possible, from my perspective as an end user." That is, just as Norman expects his intruder alarm installers to meet NSI or SSAIB standards, so Norman would like to insist on a level playing field (that phrase again) for guarding. As Norman says, some of the more reputable guarding companies are seeking to provide a better service, but are constrained by customers. But as he adds, some guarding companies’ service is questionable at any price; so Norman would be looking for a regulator to bring about standards. <br><br>The turnstiles<br><br>Time is up. I ask Norman about Northern Ireland generally. He ranges over the last 40 years. Suffice to say that the economics of guarding mirror the wider economics of NI. If you consider that the province, too, is a low-wage economy that has leaned on the fairly well-paid and steady salaries of the public sector, and bear in mind the roughly halving in the numbers of the PSNI since the official end of the Troubles: any faltering of the economy could affect politics, not just guarding. Norman has to walk into the city centre. I walk with him and we marvel at the summer weather. I recall those turnstiles and Norman points where we have passed, to where they once stood on the main street. He recalls that the turnstile operators went on strike over pay once, and police had to take their place. We shake hands and part and as I walk in the sunshine I find myself thinking, please God that the turnstiles never come back.
