Landing on desks this week is the February 2020 print edition of Professional Security magazine. As ever the issue seeks to offer something to its UK and Ireland private security readers, whatever their sector or branch of the industry – installers, end users, universities, corporate, retail, manned guarding, or cyber.
Pictured is one of the blocks of student accommodation at the main campus of the University of Leicester. We meet the head of security there, Laurence Perkins, who besides looking after tens of thousands of students, and thousands of teaching staff, and all the potential problems that arise with a site the size of a small town just to the south of a city centre – bicycle theft, personal safety – is one of the regional organisers of the campus heads of security association Aucso.
We return to the recent Black Hat Europe show in London, for the remarkable and remarkably in-depth recalling of the malware that crippled the shipping company Maersk. It prompted the logistics firm to run a years-long programme to better protect itself against another such attack; and the firm learned much about how to recover.
We round off a day with the Andover-based ACS Pacesetters guarding contractor Venture Security, which is CSAS (community safety accredited) with Hampshire and Wiltshire police forces. Such accreditation has enabled it to be hired, as we saw, by Salisbury City Council; and the business improvement districts (BIDs) in Winchester and Basingstoke. In each place, Venture are patrollers of public space – typically, high streets. We’ve featured similar work in other town and city centres, largely for BIDs, in recent months, such as in Solihull, in the December 2019 print edition; yet the law behind CSAS has been around since 2002. Is this work by badged private security officers, physically alongside uniformed police or by themselves, an idea whose time has come?
Plus all the regulars such as Una Riley’s interview, with the Security Industry Authority (SIA) chief Ian Todd, after the UK private regulator’s annual conference in November and ahead of its if anything more important skills summit in March; page of books reviewed; Robert Hall on resilience; calendar of events; magazine MD Roy Cooper’s gossip column for manufacturers and distributors; and four pages of ‘spending the budget’, and four pages about new products and services – including particular looks at counter-drone technology, and mass screening.
Visit https://professionalsecurity.co.uk/online-magazine/23-01-20/30-02/. At the ‘magazine‘ part of the website, you can freely read more past editions of the print magazine.
