How good is the security industry – good not in the sense of efficient, but ethically good?
It’s not hard to find admissions of bad occupational culture, recently for example of the Met Police, as reported by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) at Charing Cross police station in central London; and an ‘Everyday Respect’ report by the mining company Rio Tinto in Australia, by the Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick, which in the firm’s words ‘identified disturbing findings of bullying, sexual harassment, racism and other forms of discrimination throughout the company’.
That can affect security people like anyone else. At a corporate level, if a security manager learns of fraud, even though Security – with HR and compliance departments – is responsible for keeping to the rules, besides protection of assets from threats, the manager can find it – as one in that position once put it to Professional Security – ‘lonely’. That person chose to leave the firm for another.
More generally, it is a melancholy truth that someone who tries to speak up about wrong-doing, whether of outright crimes such as frauds, or offensive (or to quote Rio Tinto, ‘unacceptable’ – though evidently acceptable enough to have been widespread at its mines) workers’ behaviour, it’s the whistle-blower that has bad things happen to them, and not those doing the wrong. That rings true not matter how upright the institution – a church, prison, or the BBC, to recall the Martin Bashir case when the disgraced journalist had a graphic designer forge documents to help his pursuit of an interview with Diana, Princess of Wales. As featured in the July 2021 print edition of Professional Security, despite an internal investigation, Bashir was lauded for the interview and in the 2010s re-hired by the Corporation; the graphic designer was denied work.
On occasion, a site such as a depot can be so taken over by criminals, that they run a workplace, for the purpose not of the overall business, but to siphon off its stock; and are so in charge that they can get rid of anyone who complains, and recruit the like-minded.
Staying with recruitment, that matters because the sort of new blood brought into any organisation, and how it is trained in the occupational culture, goes a long way to determining the organisation – such as, how diverse and inclusive it is. This has long mattered in private security as for example SIA-badged individuals who are female has stubbornly not risen above ten per cent.
Yet you do not have to go far to hear from contract guarding managers that, in retail for example, a shop manager may ask for a ‘big black bloke’ to stand on a door. Not only is that rude – as if the contractor has a stock of any sort of people ready on a shelf – but it’s unrealistic, because the retailer always wants the guard ‘tomorrow’. That leaves the contractor in a dilemma – because if the contract firm does not meet the demand, the firm and the retailer well understand that some other contractor will be glad to meet the request and take the work.
At least in retail or other corporates there are HR and audit departments that at least in theory keep staff to discrimination and other laws and regulations. Not so in close protection where clients may make discriminatory requests for bodyguards. A celebrity such as a black rapper may feel they have a reason for asking for a black bodyguard, although that need not apply; in his 2021 memoir Who Dares Wins, Phil Campion relates an amusing story of protecting the singer Dizzee Rascal (‘a great guy. I had to rescue him twice, actually, and both incidents were really quite funny.’) To relate one, when Dizzee got recognised during an appearance at the outdoor Glastonbury midsummer festival, Campion feared the principal might be trodden to death: “I figure there is nothing else for it, but for me to pick him up, stick him over my shoulder and run like hell through the crowds, to get him back into the relative safety of the VIP area …. that is exactly what I proceed to do.’ Both men once inside the VIP ‘box, were ‘laughing fit to burst’.
As that and any number of incidents show, by doing a sound job, guards, of whatever age, skin colour, background or accent, bond with their client through a shared experience, however absurd. However you can easily hear in the CP sector of clients that say they do not want eastern Europeans; or, they ask only for tall and blue-eyed guards. A sheikh or an oligarch in effect is saying ‘no blacks, no gays’; as grotesque as cards in windows of lodging houses in postwar Britain that said ‘no blacks, no Irish’. The client may excuse their demand – if ever pressed – by saying that a bodyguard has to be brought close into a family’s everyday life; and that life may include countries where being homosexual is still a crime. Still, CP providers – who like the rest of the security sector are crying out for more women – can and do say that a good CP operative can be male or female, and an operative’s sexuality need never crop up.
Again, the contractor is in a quandary – to go along with a request for staff on a racist basis is against discrimination law in the UK. One way around it is to send varied people to the client for interview, because typically the client will want to see three or four, even six, guards to pick one. Then the decision becomes the client’s. To get around bias in recruitment generally, a recruiter can provide ‘blind’ CVs, so that the decision-maker judges on the CV, not someone’s photograph. That however does not do away with the act of discrimination by the person with the power to discriminate; nor does it make any less the hurt done to the discriminated person, if they enter a room at interview and are dismissed at once.
To answer the question, then; how good is the security industry? Only as good as its customers let it be.
Photo by Mark Rowe; street art, Camden, north London.
