The University of Leeds is the venue for the first conference by the association of university chiefs of security, AUCSO, since 2019. Here it’s previewed by Mark Rowe – in terms of what it will have to say about the higher education (HE) sector it protects; but first, about AUCSO itself.
It’s striking in his programme notes that AUCSO chair Les Allan, pictured, the Director of SafeGuarding and Logistics Services at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, acknowledges the covid pandemic; but next week’s conference speakers and their subjects show that the association is determined to look ahead, to the likely issues to come. The National Association for Healthcare Security (NAHS) did the same at their first conference after covid, last autumn in Birmingham (that Les Allan attended), as featured in the December print edition of Professional Security magazine.
The Leeds event organisers have been adamant that they wanted to have an in-person rather than an online or even a hybrid event. That was a statement of how AUCSO wanted speakers to commit – both from within private security, and the wider HE sector. Because isn’t the point of a conference or exhibition (AUCSO reports that the accompanying exhibition at Leeds will be its largest yet) to make personal contact with someone, those you already know and those new to you, more meaningfully than on a web chat, however useful and necessary during the pandemic?
This question of in-person or remote also has meaning for the work that AUCSO members and university guard forces carried out during covid. For many academics were able to teach remotely – indeed, they may have come to prefer that, like civil servants have proved reluctant to go back to pre-covid commuting. Security staff however in unis or elsewhere cannot do their work remotely; yes, you can do CCTV monitoring, and universities typically have extensive CCTV. But someone has to patrol the grounds; do the rounds; protect the car parks and laboratories while scientists worked on vaccines.
Therein lies one of many differences in the UK, which is already divided in so many ways: between men and women, the punctual and not, the diligent and feckless, blue and white collar workers; also, between those who during the pandemic were able to work from home, and those who had to risk contracting the coronavirus as ‘key workers’, guard forces in hospitals, warehouses, ports, campuses.
While AUCSO remains a UK-based body, it’s significant that it will hear an update from the North American-based equivalent group, IACLEA (International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators); which is holding its 2022 conference in that well-known centre of learning, Las Vegas, in June. While as the name suggests, and as AUCSO members who have taken part in the annual exchange scheme who have seen North American campus security will have experienced, North American university security can be more police-like, including by armed officers. Allowing for that cultural difference, it’s striking how the two bodies are addressing the same student welfare and well-being issues such as violence against women (see IACLEA website).
On the exchange, Leeds will hear from the latest member to take part; Simon Davis, head of security at Royal Holloway, University of London. I well remember meeting at Leeds courtesy of the now retired security manager Malcolm Dawson, his exchange – I was going to write student, but it was his counterpart at Georgia Tech, Teresa Cocker, in 2013. What has most stuck in the memory is the college sports stadium she described – and fixtures of a size that in UK terms are only matched by the FA Cup Final, that in the United States are commonplace in higher education institutions.
Credit to AUCSO for organising such an exchange. Indeed university heads of security, in the UK and elsewhere, can take an international outlook. As Les Allan told Professional Security’s own Security TWENTY event pre-covid, ST19 Glasgow, he travels regularly to Heriot-Watt’s overseas campuses (in Dubai and Malaysia). Join private security and see the world!
Full report on AUCSO 2022 in the May print edition of Professional Security magazine.
For part two of preview, click here.
