The twice-weekly thought leadership webinars by Prof Martin Gill under the banner of the OSPAs (Outstanding Security Performance Awards) have aired some daring ideas, such as yesterday when the topic was; ‘if policing is too important to be left to the police alone, what is the role of private security?’.
Another feature of the webinars has been how international they are, regularly covering the English-speaking world on three continents and including Continental Europe. So it was yesterday when one of the speakers, the former UK policeman Dave Dodge, now a consultant in South Africa, set out the violent crime in that country. Last year there were some 21,000 murders in South Africa – 58 a day – which included about 30 police killed, and 60 in private security.
While detailing some of the problems for police and private security alike, he said that one thing the two don’t do is work together. If you are a householder and press your home alarm button, for a security response, the first on the scene will be (armed) private security.
The other webinar speakers who introduced themselves were, from the UK, Steve Gardiner, head of security for the contractor OCS Group; another former policeman, Chris Philips, now a counter-terrorism and crisis management consultant, whose consultancy is IPPSO; and the retired academic Prof Philip Stenning.
Steve Gardiner hailed such UK schemes as CSAS (Community Safety Accreditation) and Secured Environments, and the UK police Project Servator patrol tactics; but not all police forces acknowledge them, he said. He believed that relationships between police and private security ‘have come a long way in a short time’: “We continually learn from police forces and the increased communication between police and their outlets into private security demonstrates a willingness on both sides. Let us say here and now, the private security industry has largely accepted poor training of officers in the past; the SIA licence training has often been seen as training when it is no more than a route into the industry.”
We need to address GDPR (data protection regulation), he said; as it meant that some sharing of CCTV footage with local police or retail crime partnership was not possible for want of a data-sharing agreement. Due to the Covid-19 lockdown, he added, contact with police has ‘diminished and fragmented’.
Chris Phillips characteristically set out his opinions on UK policing and more: “Policing across the world is in serious difficulties,” he began. “It’s got problems like it has never had before; even governments are unable to control their populations. We have a threat level not only around terrorism but all aspects of crime, that’s more diverse, more complicated, than it has ever been.
“Police forces around the world are unable to cope, there’s no doubt about that, and populations as we have seen over the last couple of weeks are revolting against the police services that are there to protect them. Many communities see them as the problem.”
Terrorist groups, organised crime and drug traffickers operate across the world and don’t recognise boundaries; policing generally does have boundaries. Police won’t be able to cope, he warned. Even in the UK, ‘where we like to think we do things well’, we cannot rely on the (recorded) crime figures.
“So what is the way forward? I don’t think we know yet,” he said, but he did urge police and private security to work together on particular issues; he gave cyber-crime as an example. There, a criminal in one country can commit a crime in London and the money can go somewhere else. The only way to solve that, he said, was by integrating police and the world of private security.
Philip Stenning last but not least, suggested that states should have a ‘minister of policing’ rather than of police, and that ministry would develop policing policy for all providers in the public and private sector. You shouldn’t be ‘defunding’ the police – a nod there to the demands of the international Black Lives Matter movement – but funding the best police provision that can be achieved, in the public interest. An idea, as he pointed out, in the Patten review of policing in Northern Ireland.
The next webinar on Tuesday, July 7 has the subject – ‘What should we expect from security leaders? Are they good enough?’. Sign up for free at https://theospas.com/thought-leadership-webinars/.
