To bring you an interesting and enjoyable magazine like this, takes many ingredients. You want to hear about new laws, or indeed about whether laws are working (page 32). You want to hear about colleagues in your particular field, whether universities (page 22) or outdoor events (page 35), or contract guarding (page 72). You want opinion, which you always get from Jim Gannon (page 14) and to know about industry figures as met and interviewed by Una Riley (page 26). But that is not all, and to get the extra something you can go beyond the security industry to find it.
I would call it human interest. You don’t need to take too deep an interest in the customer; in fact, it’s altogether best not to get too emotionally involved. It’s only a job. And yet Security is about more than locks and gates (and remembering to unlock or lock those things at the right time). Not only might you do a better job if you have sympathy with the client, the potential or actual victim of a crime, or indeed with the criminal. The power to feel sympathy with another is what separates us from the dogs. That is what I felt after I heard the story of Browns, a small Midlands builders yard (page 46). They felt relief that the prompt and professional work by a security consultant and investigator had fixed what had been worrying them. And yet I sensed something besides relief; a loss beyond the financial and physical. The way that the two directors worked, the trust that they placed in their staff, besides each other, had been called into question; and – again, this was only a sense that I had – they had yet to work out how to proceed on that basis. Because, sound businessmen that they were, they knew that it would be folly to carry on as if staff would never again turn out the way some had. Ought the directors to put the same faith in staff regardless; or would they have to act more vigilantly, and show less trust? It is not something a security consultant can address.
The nature of magazines is that even as you are reading this, I am thinking about the next one. I see that among the talks at IFSEC (see preview from page 77) is one from Dirk Wilson, on CCTV control rooms. His northern-based guarding company Sector Security Services by the way is 20 this year. That’s one of the talks I hope to sit in on, though given the crazy nature of IFSEC, I can never be sure I will make it. You could argue that control rooms are more necessary than ever, given the sheer amount of data to digest – and not only from security products. Or, you could argue that given the incredible progress in mobile computing power, the control room is wherever you are standing with your tablet or smartphone. Or both?! You tell me!?
