Editor Mark Rowe’s page 7 editorial from the February 2015 issue of Professional Security magazine.
You will know this when you tun over the page, but I will say it anyway – I hope to see you at the first Security TWENTY event of 2015, at Nottingham on February 3 (pictured is last year’s). Venue, weather and everything seemed fine last year, let’s hope for more of the same. Naturally I have to be there all day – you don’t. If you are based in the Midlands, only you don’t feel you can give all day over to the conference, feel free to turn up before 9am, have a (free) bacon butty and take in the exhibition. You can then do the rest of your working day. The only drawback then is that you can’t tuck into the free buffet lunch.
About a dozen pages this issue are given over to London security matters, starting (page 22) with how Transport for London has acted on complaints of PSA – public sexual activity – in some of its toilet cubicles, and more openly at urinals. It’s one more reminder that the security department is to a business, like the police are to the public at large; the people you can ring up with a problem, and leave it with them. Security, like the police, are the service that cannot very well pass the parcel, whether it’s a surging crowd at an event (page 24) or a crime, or some workplace wrong-doing that may involve human resources – if HR want to be involved, beyond warning how delicate it is legally. One topic that I admit I have not covered properly or indeed at all for years is workplace surveillance; and I have been prompted to go over it again (page 36) by a case made public last month by the data protection watchdogs, the ICO.
But to carry on telling you about the London pages. Some of the places are known to us even if you’ve never been, such as Canary Wharf (page 48) or the West End shops of Oxford Street (page 38). Other cities have such business estates and shopping streets, if not on London’s scale. More intriguing are the privately owned places (from page 41) that allow public access that are secured by contract guardforces. Unless you are the sort to study the plaques and signage, you would have no cause to guess the mixed nature of such places. Some find that sinister. A thought-provoking work here is Ground Control by Anna Minton. You are free to accept or discard her argument – that land in our cities is becoming privatised, used for profit, secured by CCTV, and causing social divisions and making us fearful of strangers. What is undeniable is that our cities are forever regenerating and being remodelled – think of Earls Court in west London, and indeed the remarkable temporary artwork of poppies last November in the moat of the Tower of London. Always the alternative to security is to allow things to be vandalised, stolen or bombed.
