The private sector has to do its bit to secure itself, if it expects the police and other public sector partners to do their bit, a senior university security figure suggests.
University security forces and the police should liaise more, Norman Langford, University Protection Manager, told a recent Neil Stewart Associates conference in London, titled Ensuring Student Safety and Well-being. Norman, a former police officers, was representing the Association of University Chief Security Officers. In a break in the proceedings, a police officer asked Norman why he believed what he did; the police officer disagreed. The reason? At educational campuses in the police officer’s force area, establishments did not have security officers, only porters, untrained in security, who did not know anything about security. In the police officer’s view, those universities were not pulling their weight; on that basis, it was unfair to expect the police to bail the campus out. This was new to Norman Langford.<br><br>Norman’s reply is that the boundary between university and society crime has blurred, certainly on his patch. He describes how Coventry is a city-centre university: “We are regularly arresting people for crime, some not committed against the university; telling police about disorder in the street; and giving evidence recorded on CCTV, to help police prosecute.” <br><br>Equally, Norman can only point to his local West Midlands force, where the fairly new chief constable Paul Scott-Lee this year invited the area’s university heads of security, vice-chancellors, and police officers responsible for patrolling the campuses to Birmingham headquarters one evening. The message of a presentation: the force has brought down crime, but wants to work to reduce campus crime, to make them better, safer places to study. This isn’t new: in our November 2003 edition we reported how the West Midlands Police recruitment bus visited campuses at the start of the new academic year, handing out among other things advice and beer mats with crime prevention messages in student lingo. Coventry has two dedicated police staff: PC Laura Dumbleton, and community support officer Lyndon Clarke. <br><br>“And so far it’s working really well. We have now a police office in one of our buildings, where the officer posted to the university is located part of the day; the police community support officer can be found there part of the day.” The police officer has a university e-mail address, advertised on posters around the campus. Laura Dumbleton (who recently flew to South Korea to take part in Tae Kwon-Do world championships) can work shifts appropriate to the university’s problems, “which is so much more beneficial,” Norman says. “And also she has got stuck into a number of crime prevention and crime reduction initiatives. We are not at all about having her there purely to investigate crimes and investigate offenders. We are looking at a major continued initiative on crime reduction and crime prevention.” For example, she is working with Norman’s protection officers, One, Darren Knight, mans a stall at start of year induction, giving advice to new students. “He then goes out to houses where students live, all over Coventry, seeing them in their houses, and we have spent a lot of money” – he is talking four figures – “on electronic timers, passive infra-red alarms, panic attack alarms, door and window alarms, and [property] marker pens.” Such visits by a protection officer are accompanied by a police officer.<br><br>Talking of protection officer, why the name? Norman replies that it goes back ten years, to when Coventry reviewed its security. It was felt, rightly, Norman says, that the role of officers was more than security; it was to ensure a feeling of safety and well-being – a topic, indeed, of that Neil Stewart conference. Protection officer was felt to be a less severe, more friendly and accurate name than security officer. What then of officer uniforms? Norman describes it as a fairly standard one: white shirt, tie, black trousers, epaulettes, hat: “Because we want to give the impression, not just to students but certainly want to give the impression to potential criminals that we are out on the ground, we create this visible presence, and we are going to deal with offenders; which we do. We arrest a lot of people and they [officers] are trained to understand their powers of arrest, what an arrestable offence is, and their civilian powers to implement that. So we don’t pussy-foot around when we have offenders.” That is something you cannot do in a quasi-friendly uniform, Norman adds.
