As in a shop, in a magazine you are supposed to put the best goods at the front, in your window. I have not altogether managed that, this month. For a piece of news of most interest to installers and manufacturers and specifiers of CCTV is towards the back, on page 78, the interview with Surveillance Camera Commissioner Tony Porter. You could wait to hear more until November 2, when Tony is one of the speakers at the last Security TWENTY event of 2017, at Heathrow. In the world of surveillance regulation, things don’t move that fast. But they are moving as fast as Tony can make it happen, in the effort to keep up with the changes in technology – what of the prospect of body-worn or drone video being linked to analytics? So that, I am thinking aloud here, a car park warden captures your face, and up it pops that you’ve not paid your car tax?! Tony has raised the prospect of installers, manufacturers and others working in CCTV self-assessing to the surveillance camera code of practice. If you groan at the prospect of one more qualification, I’m just telling you. The commissioner doesn’t have the power to make you do it; but maybe your client (especially if you work with local government) may like you to. Maybe you might like to.
Time flies. It doesn’t seem like four years since Professional Security began reporting on the counter-terrorism patrolling method Project Servator. But then when I visited Sellafield recently to see how the armed police there carry out Servator (page 44; pictured), it certainly did feel like 30 years since as an inquisitive young man I had been to the Sellafield visitors’ centre. It’s as well to think sometimes in such perspective, to show the sheer amount of security that has arisen in our time. I am not suggesting that places did not have security in the old days; only that all aspects of security – the perimeters, surveillance, the vetting of people before Sellafield lets them in – have grown so.
It may be that I have only just noticed; I keep coming across people in private security who are aware and articulate about what sort of security we want as a society. You may say that’s beyond your pay grade; you’re providing a service to a customer; but security managers are the ones that their employers look to, for advice on the amount and style of security to have. And there are choices. You can pile up all the security you want. One man recently recalled to me that he had a job of close protection of political leaders. Could he guarantee their safety? he was asked. Yes, he replied, if they were placed in a concrete bunker. There is risk everywhere and there is no total security. Hence efforts such as Servator and by the Surveillance Camera Commissioner, to set standards. Without such people getting a grip, you are left with uncontrolled surveillance and bad choices in security, and security done to people, not for them.
