Author: Philip Grindell
ISBN No:
Review date: 17/12/2025
No of pages: 212
Publisher: Practical Inspiration Publishing
Publisher URL:
https://practicalinspiration.com/book/personal-threat-management
Year of publication: 03/02/2025
Brief:
price
£19.99, paperback; also ebook
Philip Grindell’s new book Personal Threat Management is useful, important, and profoundly humanistic, writes Mark Rowe.
He has addressed some paradoxes of safety and security; we have ever more surveillance products, yet they don’t make (some) people feel safe. Members of Parliament have armed police, gates and anti-ram barriers, and around the corner is the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police; yet some feel at risk, and unhappy at the (online) threats aimed at them. As Philip states right away, harm posed by threats is not only physical violence; ‘in many cases the harm may be psychological, financial or reputational’. Those intangible types of harm may be hard to define, yet they can change people’s lives for the worse, whether due to stalking or online trolling. Also intangible is trust. Again, early in the book Philip raises the murder of Sarah Everard. One monstrous police officer has as the author acknowledged, ‘had a significant impact on how safe some women feel in the UK’. That ought to make no sense. Most police, and indeed private security, people go to work only wanting to do good. Yet any of us can have a mistaken grip on reality. If the job of private security management demands that its practitioners focus on what’s real, that includes being honest about when they’ve fallen short. Philip makes that admission. As a young soldier he flew with other newly-trained young men to Belfast to serve in Northern Ireland. He and they expected to see bomb craters. “Initially, I felt scared, as if armed gunmen would immediately confront me.” With experience, he became less scared. “Nothing had changed except my perceptions, feelings and skills. The levels of security hadn’t changed. I had.”
Case studies
While Philip is respectful to clients, readers will learn plenty from case studies, including royalty, based on his own work and the public domain. The humanism is two-fold. People are precious; anything material can be replaced. Hence his advice is, if you find yourself confronted by a robber, to give them what they want. Is it worth risking getting knifed, as robbers may well be ready to wound you for your phone? That implies we have to be comfortable with renouncing material things. Even harder is not being precious about our beliefs, if we (and politicians and public figures above all) get into a confrontation. If you can’t avoid it, Philip’s advice is it’s ‘better to be agreeable and walk away than to feel like you must be right and end up injured’. A similar sort of letting-go is called for in terms of (mainly online) abuse against a public figure; while loud, it’s rarely posing a genuine threat. Indeed, the very fact that the messages seek to intimidate may mean that the sender does not intend to be violent; to actually carry out what they say. The professional skill for the security person lies in accepting that, and focusing on the few who are a threat (though they may not say so). Philip has actually given several books’ worth of advice: about stalkers and the fixated, situational awareness, and ‘safer events and functions’. As the attempt on Donald Trump’s life by a sniper at Butler in July 2024 showed (the book is current enough to touch on it), threats against VIPs can be of the highest consequence. Philip has described the coming Martyn’s Law as ‘necessary’, and event planning by security-risk managers as ‘at best mixed’.
Threat assessment
A threat assessment to work to is important: “Without that, it becomes little more than guesswork.” If I were to single out one chapter, it’d be ‘Stop giving away your secrets’. Public figures, whether entertainers or corporate executives or government ministers, may expose themselves to risk by over-sharing online – taking and posting pictures that give away where they’ll be and when, gifting intelligence to criminals. Or, their children or public relations staff may be posting about them (‘far too much private information is being leaked via the internet and the deep and dark web’ is among his conclusions). As Philip wisely laid out, social media is unavoidable, and indeed profitable; the risks ‘can be thwarted by some simple good practices and continued training and refreshing’. Perhaps the hardest advice of his to follow is ‘never respond’ and don’t take online hate against you personally. Everyone has their own tipping point; you are able (as Winston Smith exclaimed when in O’Brien’s flat in Orwell’s 1984) to switch it off. While security industry standards and quality are, as he put it, ‘disappointing’, you can be proactive about your client and employer’s security, so that they can feel safer.
See also Philip’s website Defuse Global – https://www.defuseglobal.com/.
