A preview of the November 2015 print issue of Professional Security magazine.
On journeys to London to events I see if the conference or show will pass the newspaper test. While I read a newspaper on the train on the way, does it have something on the topic I am about to hear about? And often it does. The other week the British Retail Consortium crime conference (page 56) failed the test, but only because I didn’t open a paper beforehand. Afterwards I picked up an Evening Standard and it ran a full page story of a City gent who, by clicking into an email he thought was from a friend, lost £25k from his account and would have lost another £479,000 if he hadn’t spotted something was wrong. As an aside, it must be nice to have all that money in an account; the article described the dreary lack of response from the victim’s bank, the bank the stolen money was paid into, and the inaccurately-named Action Fraud reporting line.
Evidently good security matters, because if staff were better at spotting cyber and other threats, they would suffer less, at home or at work. Strange then that security does a poor job at selling its benefits, according to the latest report from Prof Martin Gill’s excellent Security Research Initiative. While I have digested it at some length (page 30), if you want to read it all, you are free to download from the SRI website.
This issue and next I have covered local government CCTV in a major way (page 42), partly because it’s important in itself and partly because it’s the glue for wider security in towns and cities, for cash in transit deliveries for instance. Size of control room is important, like so much else in life, but it doesn’t have to matter. Weston super Mare’s control room isn’t the largest, yet it’s managing despite public sector austerity. Doing a good job isn’t enough; a control room might have to sacrifice some of the original crime prevention and community safety work, and make itself useful to others, inside the council and beyond. That means forging contacts as police retreat physically and symbolically from many town centres. I was surprised that the police station in Weston, pictured, a familiar if ugly sight for decades on the left, between the railway station and the beach, is shut to the public. Control rooms and others working as partners have to share data – they have to have goodwill and the technical means to share. Hence security firms are seeing an opportunity there (page 50).
It’s been the season of industry gatherings, and we bring you pictures from the Jsafe dinner (page 70) and our own Women in Security awards (page 26). Keep an eye out for how to apply for WiS in 2016.
