All rules should be carefully written and strictly adherred to, or they will collapse, writes our regular contributor Peter Whitehead in the August print issue of Professional Security magazine.
One reason why some policies fail like this is because rule-producing excutives only think of what they want, rather than what the public might need. Example: some readers will have been thinking after reading last issue, โWhy was Peter arriving at a crown court with a camera?โ Answer: I am never without a camera. Policy builders need to be able to think laterally. This camera problem has existed for several years, where photographers have been confronted by authorities who are concerned about national security, and I will leave photographers and officials to argue away, separate from this article. What I am interested in is how fanatical policies can lose sight of their intended objectives whilst accelerating to try and regain a view of them.
In a shopping centre
Several years ago I travelled to a massive shopping centre in East Anglia to train store detectives for a retailer. I had arrived very early and so walked around the huge centre; the architecture was such that if you ascended up to the top floorโs main landing you could see right through all the levels to the ground floor and this was visually amazing. I wanted to take a picture of this scene and was preparing my compact camera when it was suddenly pulled from my grasp from behind. A man in overalls marked with the centreโs logo stood there, waving my camera in the air and shouting. He was telling me that I had broken the law and would not give me my camera back. I thought that he would soon drop it and I needed someone to control him so I suggested that he should take me to a manager immediately. Fortunately this triggered him into speeding me within the centreโs management offices. A manager attended, returned my camera, calmed down the centre employee and sent him back to his cleaning duties. He then explained that all cameras were banned everywhere in the centre, but behind him, on the office wall, was a huge framed marketing picture of a group of teenagers enjoying themselves within the centreโs central โhubโ and having their group-picture taken by a friend. When shown the picture, which he must have seen every hour of his employment, he just stopped speaking. When asked, he explained that there were no special conditions of entry, or any signs banning the use of anything at all. I asked if I could take that one photograph from the top-landing and he said that I could.
Review reality
If companies want to save time, money and reputation, and spare their guarding (and cleaning?) force from getting tied up in possibly difficult and confrontational situations, it could be a really good idea to review policies, procedures and assignment instructions from time to time to discover the โsilliesโ that could one day embarrass them badly, or worse. About 30 years ago a well known person was unlawfully detained outside a shop and subsequently that retailerโs reputation was damaged because of the incident. Soon afterwards that retailer instructed its security force that no famous people should be arrested in future. A couple of years ago I was shopping in a local store when I overheard one guard explaining to another that they were all banned from making arrests after a damaging incident in another area, and this โflat-out to full-stopโ security management is an extreme morale-buster for security forces, who simply need good training, clear instructions and sound back-up to lift them towards best standards. Store detectives and retail guards have always been taught a basic โarrestโ rule, similar to this: before they can detain a shop-thief they must have seen that person go to the shop display, select a shop-item, conceal it in some way and leave without offering to pay for it, and they must not have lost sight of the person. This scenario can be enacted, discussed, shown with still or moving pictures or written down; trainees might even be given a memory card, but it will still not be enough, and here are some reasons why.
Concealing
There are nine other actions which can replace โconcealing the itemโ and yet still complete the crime of theft, but these are not shown to many trainees, so when they see thefts happening with no concealment they lose respect for the rule, and may eventually discard it. Some retail security people might have doubts about these โother nineโ, so I will show a couple. A person goes into a shop, selects a shop-item, goes to the checkouts and says to the till operator, โI bought this yesterday, and just needed to see if there were any more like it,โ and leaves the store. That was a theft (by deception) without any concealment, and a senior store detective would probably be permitted to detain this thief outside the store. One more: a person walks into a shop, selects an item, and clutching it to his chest then runs like the wind, dodging to left and right, flying down the aisles, vaulting the checkouts and dissappearing into the far beyond. There are seven more shop thefts that do not use concealment. This situation creates difficulties. The first is that some readers might be saying to themselves, โWe donโt need to explain these thefts, theyโre so obvious!โ and these people have just committed a serious training sin, refusing to teach trainees completely and properly. Nothing is obvious to a trainee, and if such readers could not explain the other seven actions which replace concealment they would immediately see that nothing is clear until explained.
