Security Manager’s Guide to Disasters

by Mark Rowe

Author: Anthony D Manley

ISBN No: 9781138113695

Review date: 28/03/2024

No of pages: 408

Publisher: CRC Press

Publisher URL:
https://www.crcpress.com/Security-Managers-Guide-to-Disasters-Managing-Through-Emergencies-Violence/Manley/p/book/9781138113695

Year of publication: 23/08/2017

Brief:

price

£59.99 paperback

Security Manager’s Guide to Disasters: Managing Through Emergencies, Violence, and Other Workplace Threats by Anthony Manley covers plenty of ground, as indeed it has to, given the title.

The author, an American, was a policeman and is now a security consultant. He opens with roles and some necessary attributes, then moves on to actual threats, not only security ones such as acts of terrorism but extreme weather, and fire. While some of those catastrophes are unlikely to happen to a reader, he does go into violence in the workplace at length, which touches on general management, and HR issues such as absenteeism. As a book from the United States, some parts, such as the criminal and civil law, are not as suited to a non-US audience, and knocks out about the last fifth of the book for readers from the UK and Europe. Many of the news and other examples cited are likewise from the US.

You can turn to numerous books about the topics inside this Security Manager’s Guide, for instance about bomb threats, industrial espionage, and incident control. What Manley does do is put plenty of thinking, advice and ideas in one book.
Whatever the threat, man-made or natural, random and sudden or not, we should guard against complacency just because something doesn’t happen to us. As the author writes early on: “Bear in in mind, therefore, that the best time to respond to a disaster is before it happens.”

He writes often of ‘loss prevention’, rather than security, defining loss prevention as asset protection. Hence it’s that manager’s business to look after business assets whether the threat is from flood or computer crime. As a former policeman himself, he notes that many who have entered private security from law enforcement ‘generally have a mindset conditioned by their many years of exposure to crime and punishment’ and think in terms of response, and arrest. Manley urges security managers not to have a ‘cops and robbers’ attitude but to think in proactive terms of prevention; to be a motivator, and a communicator. This security person may be, the author warns, viewed as an irritant, or ignored; and the manager will have to determine ‘how sincere the company is in its view of safety and security’.

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