The last 12 months have been so wretched that it’s a pleasure to pay tribute to a milestone today, not only something good, but something good that probably would never have arisen, but for covid: the OSPAs thought leadership webinars, begun a year ago by Prof Martin Gill, pictured, of the consultancy Perpetuity Research, and this afternoon running the 100th, writes Mark Rowe.
They have run usually every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon (UK time), except what Martin took a couple of weeks off in September. Otherwise, the webinars have not only given form to the week for regular attenders – and it’s telling that among the attenders are those who have previously been panel members. Martin chairs the same format – giving each invited guest, usually three in all, three minutes (or so) to make their opening statement, then as chair Martin puts questions posted by the audience. About 40 minutes later, he gives them a minute or so to sum up, and perhaps he might make a comment at the very end, or he might not have time; for the webinars are seldom anything but full and done at pace.
This afternoon’s 100th is at the same time a trademark of Martin Gill’s work as an academic criminologist, now in his fourth decade; and untypical of the webinars. One previous webinar has been the same format as today’s – two former career criminals talk about their frauds, theft and drug crimes, and discussing ‘why security doesn’t work’. This has long been Martin’s forte; as the title of his 2000 book suggests: Commercial Robbery – Offenders’ Perspectives on Security and Crime Prevention.
Martin over the years has gone into prisons and talked to offenders, to learn from them. Which might sound obvious – after all, a mini-industry of penetration testers, physical and cyber, do the same thing, only with the client’s permission and not for their own gain. The findings are unsettling, too unsettling for some: criminals often get away with it; they are able to find ways around security measures, human, physical and electronic; they learn from each other, comparing notes in prison (no holding back on data privacy between criminals!).
As Martin regularly says at the opening of a webinar, it’s about critiquing – not so much coming up with answers to problems and crimes, or laying blame for shortcomings, but analysing, so as to learn, and apply what’s learned, to do better. It doesn’t make him the typical academic criminologist, and again it’s telling that he soon gave up the University of Leicester for his own consultancy, Perpetuity; taking on work for the Home Office, and carrying out studies under the umbrella of the Security Research Initiative, funded by industry.
As to the worth of the webinars, like all things some have been more satisfying and penetrating critiques than others; but to repeat, the point is not so much about getting to the bottom of an issue, and coming up with things to do, but inquiry; the classical Greeks would have recognised it. It’s striking that the webinar topics do not have the feel of flagging, and it’s quite all right that some topics come back – for example, around mental health, both as an issue for security people to handle when it’s a problem for others, such as suicidal thoughts, and a problem within security people.
What, then, have been the themes of this first year? In a word, the webinars have been international, both in the origins of the speakers – while usually the webinars are in English, and many webinars have at least one speaker from the UK, and others from English-speaking countries such as North America and Australia, it’s usual for speakers to be in India; Kenya; Continental Europe. Not only does that – even before anyone opens their mouth – suggest that different countries have the same issue to tackle, whether mental ill-health, or the cashless society, or the ‘dark web’, itself illuminating and consoling. But for webinars, in the pre-pandemic course of things, even at industry events it was rare to get a foreign point of view.
Staying with international, the webinars have also treated with international security questions, such as modern slavery. What does that have to do with the site security manager, or the guard on a gate? As a webinar earlier this month heard, it’s everyone’s responsibility ultimately, or rather the responsibility of everyone who wears clothing made in a factory where the workers are in debt bondage; or using a mobile phone whose precious metals have likewise been mined by slave labourers. Quite apart from the more direct responsibility for the supply chain of the retailer and wholesaler or online sourcer of cheap clothing, or manufacturers of consumer goods whose materials are derived from slave labour.
Martin Gill at the same time drives the conversation by putting the questions from the audience to the panelists, and lets the invited guests have their say, and is not afraid to say that he is learning things he didn’t know. At most he mentions at the end, the themes that he has been developing for many years – that security done well is good for business, morally good and profitable financially; which does however require that security people ought to be more business-savvy, and not be their own worst enemies by insisting on things that aren’t commercially practicable, or not using language that business understands, or not being approachable enough and not approaching other departments. Another theme is the need to measure success and effectiveness, to put a value on it, to ‘sell’ security to the board, to those signing off budgets.
This focus on business security makes Martin Gill an unusual professor of criminology; he was unusual even when he made his inaugural lecture as a professor, at Leicester in February 2003. As someone who was there that evening and who has heard him speak many times since, and indeed he has been a speaker at Professional Security’s own Security TWENTY events, I can say he is most arresting when he speaks of the criminals he has interviewed. Put another way, that sits poorly with the usual academic criminologist, who like other academics in the humanities will go with the herd; and have a phobia of making original, contestable statements; because of the mania for quoting only the secondary literature, in other words quoting other academics, who in turn will quote you, so that everyone looks good. While Martin Gill has been the editor of arguably the weightiest single book, literally and metaphorically, for security managers in English, The Handbook of Security (published by Palgrave), and for Palgrave he has been the editor of a series of crime prevention and security management academic volumes, he has not let academia or the demand to be published academically constrain him. And wisely, for academic criminology and the humanities more generally – tied to teaching students – are in trouble, financially and even existentially; the academics’ output is only read by themselves, and maybe not even them.
The webinars have proven also a tie to Perpetuity’s other OSPAs arm, the awards running in several countries. UK academia is trying to justify and measure itself in terms of ‘impact’; by that reckoning, the pandemic lockdown has for sure had an impact; but one of the consolations has been the twice-weekly OSPAs webinars.
