The third edition of the Handbook of Security, edited by the criminologist and founder of the consultancy Perpetuity Research, Prof Martin Gill, has been published. It was trailed in the October 2021 print edition of Professional Security magazine after we got an update on it from Martin.
It’s the sort of book that you don’t want to drop on your foot – it tops 1000 pages and contains 45 contributions from scholars across the world. UK contributors are to the fore. Among them are Paul Ekblom on horizon scanning; Prof Alison Wakefield, former chair of the Security Institute, as co-author of chapters on the security officer, ‘Overextended and Underappreciated’, and security and the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’; Prof Mark Button of Portsmouth University as a co-author of chapters on ‘Economic and Industrial Espionage’ and separately ‘Corruption, Bribery and Corporate Crime’, and with Jim Gee on ‘Crime on the Darknet’. The veteran criminologist Prof Michael Levi is author of a chapter, ‘Money Laundering: Some Considerations for Security Professionals’; Rachel Armitage is co-author of the chapter on CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) and domestic security; Adrian Beck the authority on retail shrinkage writes on video and retailing; Adam White considers the cross-over between the private military sector and private security; Kate Moss writes on protest; and Emmeline Taylor of City, University of London analyses violence and aggression against shop workers. Last but not least, Leicester criminologist Matt Hopkins contributes a chapter on business resilience to crime, an under-researched area in academic terms; and Martin Gill rounds off with a final chapter.
Covered are various physical world and cyber security issues; including the ways private policing is portrayed in films; the economic case for security; evaluations of different security approaches, by the Nottingham Trent University criminologist Andy Newton; and the role of security in tackling offences from burglary to terrorism to money laundering to corruption. Criminologist Rob Mawby’s chapter looks at the impact of covid on crime rates.
The work has been updated from the second, 2014 edition, and has two new sections and new chapters looking at ‘Better Security’ and the ‘Impact of Security’, such as carbon footprint.
Here are some of the reviews so far:
“Dr. Gill continues to leverage his extensive knowledge and expert contacts to provide practitioners and academics alike a strong resource as they learn and plan.” – Read Hayes, Research Scientist, University of Florida, and Director of the Loss Prevention Research Council in the United States.
“Martin Gill, in this the third and very welcome edition of the Handbook of Security, has skilfully curated a masterful review of developments in a rapidly evolving field of enquiry that has been, and is being, constantly reshaped by the novel harmscapes that have emerged as a defining feature of 21st century existence.” – Clifford Shearing, University of Cape Town, South Africa and Griffith University, Australia.
It’s £199.50 as an e-book and £249 in print as a hardback (ISBN 978-3-030-91734-0), published by Palgrave-Springer.
