Case Studies

City centre covid compliance: continued

by Mark Rowe

Professional Security found impeccable work by private security and general retail staff in two city centre malls on Saturday to enforce covid-19 social distancing and other restrictions.

The most that store staff can do is enforce compliance, typically at the door. Apple stores, of a piece with their brand, take the most pains. Six or seven staff were at and outside the door of a branch we stood outside at, on Saturday.

A security officer patrolling its mall outside the store was without a mask; however he was wearing a sunflower lanyard to show that he had a reason for not ‘covering up’. But to return to Apple; as their shoppers typically like to dwell and try the products, queues are likely while each store keeps to the limit of how many customers are allowed in a space. Staff each holding an Apple device manage the queues. The one SIA badge-wearing officer looked formal, even funeral, in black suit and dark tie and white shirt.

Overall, the city centre was not quite back to normal; nor did it help that the city’s meridian, a clock tower, was fenced off for re-paving, leaving a narrow corridor for shoppers to walk around the central square, and making social distancing impossible. Yet it was striking how the crowds were out, and had adapted to virus restrictions.

Police were on foot patrol on streets, while not appearing to seek to engage with people, but – as with patrolling before coronavirus – to provide a visual deterrent. This is in line with national police policy during the virus outbreak; to only fine offenders as a last resort. The problem during covid-19; while the sight of police may deter people from dropping litter (and wherever the police aren’t, such low-level wrong-doing may carry on with impunity), the coronavirus public health emergency is of a different order than dropping a crisp packet. And just as police may be too slow to respond to a reported shop theft, in effect meaning that shoplifting is de-criminalised, so it may be with covid rules. Police and security staff alike may be loath to seek out offenders, which would only bring the risk of infection, besides aggression from the person detained.

People queued patiently to enter a Wetherspoons pub. Five women in costume were presumably a hen party. Contrast how retail has had to adapt sharpish to satisfy both the authorities and customers, with local government (which kept public toilets closed in holiday areas in summer, then complained that people urinated in public) and the professions (solicitors and dentists, for example, are avoiding seeing anyone in person, even resorting to signs asking people not to take offence if they are asking to social-distance on the doorstep).

Whether a rule is about coronavirus or not, if too many are not obeying – and anyone going around can see plentiful cases of non-mask-wearing on trains and in malls – it is beyond any security force to remedy. Consider that begging and drunkenness have become non-offences.

With coronavirus rules as with pre-virus rules of behaviour, the challenge for those enforcing compliance – whether SIA badge wearing, or littering or smoking in malls – remains the same: not so much how to check that majority who will always keep to the rules, but how to stop – to ‘disrupt’, to use policing jargon – the minority of rule-breakers. And while arguably it’s no great loss to society if someone drops their cigarette butts on the pavement, someone walking around a mall without a mask could be spreading a highly contagious and deadly virus.

Professional Security in Loughborough, a university town, saw a queue of dozens of student-age young people outside a pub, making no apparent effort to social-distance. If they acted that way in public at 3pm on a Saturday, what were they getting up to inside the pub? The local council, Charnwood, has already called on pubs to play their part in keeping to the rules to combat the spread of infection.

Yet here was another case of how risk of infecting others with Covid-19 could be balanced against the risk of not allowing what is after all natural behaviour. For students rely on the first week of their academic year to make friends. If they do not – and how else can they go about doing it, except by being social – what of the risk to their mental health? As students are statistically not likely to die of the virus, might the greater risk be that some die of suicide due to their disappointing, lonely, unhappy time on campus? That question is well above the pay grade of door staff and mall guards.

More in the November 2020 print edition of Professional Security magazine.

Related News

  • Case Studies

    Cathedral install

    by Mark Rowe

    An intruder alarm system, designed for sensitive sites, has been installed into Rochester Cathedral, pictured, by Chubb Fire & Security Limited, to…

  • Case Studies

    Abu Dhabi manual launch

    by Mark Rowe

    To guide the development of safe and secure communities, the Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council (UPC) has introduced the Abu Dhabi Safety…

  • Case Studies

    Video for icebreaker

    by Mark Rowe

    Finland has the world’s second-largest fleet of icebreakers. One of the latest ships, called Polaris, has Bosch video cameras and a Bosch…

Newsletter

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay on top of security news and events.

© 2024 Professional Security Magazine. All rights reserved.

Website by MSEC Marketing