Welcome to The Security Consultant’s Handbook.
This book is not a training manual about the security industry, or any subdiscipline within it. There are hundreds, or thousands, of specialist security training services and guidance manuals out there that can explain and evaluate their niche and technical specialisms far better than I.
Yet several years have now passed since a range of very decent generalist support books for security managers and practitioners have been produced. A lot has happened since: economic crashes, national security data haemorrhages, nuclear reactor meltdowns, nihilistic international terrorism and a social media revolution that has brought about individual and corporate liberation and tyranny; possibly in equal measure.
My purpose, therefore, is to set out to provide a compendium of business approaches, opportunities and risks that fairly reflect those faced by the modern security entrepreneur and practitioner, at this point in time. I say entrepreneur because – whether we are sole contractors, employees, or public authority officials – most of us nowadays are required to innovate and adopt entrepreneurial approaches by our paymasters.
More than ever before, a failure to read and adapt to our operating environments, can leave us short of perceived value. The business world is more accessible, but possibly less forgiving, than ever before.
In this book, I therefore aim to provide a holistic oversight of essential core knowledge, emerging opportunities and approaches to corporate thinking that are being increasingly demanded by employers and buyers in the security market. This book aims to provide options and directions for those who are ambitious to succeed in security, either individually or as part of a team.
I also hope to stimulate some fresh ideas and new routes to market to consider for security professionals who may feel that they are under-appreciated and over-exerted in traditional business domains. I do hope that each of the eight chapters really does help the reader to enjoy a renewed sense of passion and control over their entrepreneurial activity.
This book will therefore unapologetically seek to encourage and facilitate the reader’s own lateral thinking in relation to existing markets, management and business approaches. Near the beginning, we provide some foundation knowledge of so-called emerging markets, even though these markets – such as Brazil, India, Russia and China – have now been maturing for several decades.
Moreover, I attempt to encourage the reader’s own skills and knowledge, by linking much of our content to further opportunities for training, higher education and longer-term professional development.
Possibly the biggest barrier to our own success is an individual and collective impatience with reflective learning techniques. Our inability to sensibly review or admit to various faults, is a fundamental recurring weakness for us information-rich, but knowledge-poor, human beings.
Since time immemorial, cognitive bias has been a significant contributor in the causation of wars, industrial-scale accidents and bankruptcies. Being caught in an activity trap, or constricted by tunnel vision, prevents us from exploiting so many nearby opportunities to improve and excel. I therefore very much hope that this book encourages readers to reach beyond their comfort zones, yet still remain within the bounds of law and sanity!
Today’s world does unequivocally provide a treasure trove of opportunity for entrepreneurs and innovators, I believe. It’s surely the dilemma as to which doors to open or close that tends to vex us entrepreneurs.
This said, I hope that our readers’ decision-making capabilities may be well assisted by discovering lots of new facts and case studies across the eight chapters. These sections seek to cover foundation knowledge in the domains of: entrepreneurial practice; management practice; legislation and regulation; private investigations; information and cyber security; protective security; safer business travel; personal and organisational resilience.
For context, I’m a security management lecturer and security contractor. I first conceived the idea for this book as I was travelling from Belorussky railway station northwards towards Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, on a sleek, bullet-shaped, Aero Express shuttle train. The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics had safely concluded a few hours before.
I had taken some time out from university teaching and accepted a brief security contract. My role on this occasion was as a protective security agent for an American client organisation in Russia.
Our company had had some Olympic guests travelling back through Moscow from Sochi, mainly towards the United States. Some were a little apprehensive about their transit. Understandably so. Suicide bombings at Russian rail stations had occurred a few weeks before the Games. Moreover, 100 or so suicide bombings during the last decade and a half had hit the Russian people hard. But our people were safely through and back in various planetary quarters. Job done.
As I boarded the train, a bilingual announcement told us that chemical weapons or firearms were – thankfully – not permitted on this train. Passengers around me curled up into their coats with the same type of melancholic gloom reserved for any pre-dawn, Monday morning, midwinter commute anywhere in the world.
My Wi-Fi connection suddenly kicked in. Emails pulsed through from my own students in Iraq, the UAE, Canada and US. My project bosses in Florida had also pinged me a message or two about returning items. Another colleague sent me an SMS: should we add a brief evaluation of ongoing events in Ukraine to my daily threat assessment? Ukraine’s President had been toppled by protestors 48 hours before. ‘Nftr’ I responded (Nothing further to report). As things stood, all our guests had safely left the region.
Moments later I received a text message from a Chamber of Commerce boss in Russia. Another text streamed in, this time from my mother. My old dog Floyd was asleep by her home hearth. She expressed genuine surprise that I was still alive. Perhaps even a small suspicion that I hadn’t been in Russia at all, because I wasn’t even slightly incapacitated.
How perspectives can vary. I instantly thought back to the previous night’s dinner on Moscow’s neon-illuminated boulevard, Novy Arbat. A Russian friend recoiled in dismay when I told them that western visitors to Moscow actually required a physical security detail: “We have far less crime than New York”, they moaned.
So there we have it. The world has closed in, just as the Scorpions sang back in 1991 after the Berlin Wall was hammered down. Today our planet is a global village. We global citizens can talk to one another and see one another, although we may all live in wildly different time zones. We all share the same data sets and read the same news blogs. We are all – I hope – more interested in developing intercontinental business alliances, rather than intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Yet human perspectives can remain poles apart; entrenched by different experiences, cultures, approaches and interpretations.
Knowing in essence who and what to believe, and also what to do if certain scenarios occur, does actually get to the heart of what constitutes working life as a security operative. Beneath the corporate-enshrined authority of an executive boardroom, there really aren’t many company roles with such a significant sense of duty and responsibility, than that of a professional security officer.
For those interested in progression within the security profession, the world is your operating environment. Therefore, good subject matter knowledge is not so much a route to power, but a fundamental duty of your day job role, which is to keep your colleagues and assets safe and secure.
This may be quite a daunting statement.
This publication is therefore designed to be a practical and enabling guide for security officers and contractors. Its purpose is to plug information gaps, or provoke new ideas, rather than to be treated as a fully garrisoned academic tome.
My aim was to provide a ‘real-world’ support tool for those who want to offer safe, proportionate and value-driven security services to their clients.
By carrying out some 50 interviews with leading security practitioners, and reviewing a large range of credible literature, which now supports business security activity, I have tried wherever possible to suspend personal opinions and philosophies. I wanted to let the experts and facts speak for themselves.
Nevertheless, personal leanings and preferences will be evident, such as the choices I have made around chapter topics. These editorial choices tend to reflect my philosophy and my own experiences within the profession, as to what topics have emerged to be significant from a corporate world viewpoint.
I apologise if this book’s menu does not suit every reader’s taste. Please do let me know if significant areas of interest have been omitted and we will seek to include such omissions in subsequent editions.
In closing, I would like to thank the many interviewees who shared their insights both for open-source and background contexts. Face-to-face interviews were conducted during 2013, 2014 and early 2015 in mainland Britain, Northern Ireland, Lebanon, the US, the Czech Republic and Russian Federation. I also express sincere thanks to a fantastic range of students at Buckinghamshire New University’s growing Department of Security and Resilience, based in the UK, where I teach as a senior lecturer.
For context, many, if not all, of my undergraduate and postgraduate students can claim to be officially mature because they are over 25 years old. They also work as full-time security consultants and managers in some of the world’s most complex and volatile environments. Each student works viscerally hard in their day job. They somehow study in their non-existent ‘spare’ time. More often than not each learner defeats exceptional life constraints. Their motivation and application continues to inspire me. Some were able to share their own work experiences for learning purposes within this book. I am hugely indebted that so many found the time and patience to teach and support me, when it should of course be the other way around.
I would particularly like to thank Phil Wood MBE, former Head of Academic Department at Buckinghamshire New University, for his support when I joined his team of academics. Likewise, a ‘thank you’ also to our new Head of Academic Department, Emma Parkinson, for her support and endless sympathy as I came to conclude writing this book. I am also indebted to my fellow security management lecturers, Simon King and Gavin Butler, alongside Dianne Cameron, Dianne Dunn and Peter Brown (senior registrar) in our university’s Blended Learning Unit. They all bore the brunt of my research and book writing diversions. For context, Simon King also very kindly contributed subsections 4.5 (surveillance techniques) and 4.6 (electronic surveillance, the law and ethics) of this book’s Private Investigations chapter. Gavin Butler also very kindly supplied some of the chapter subheadings and was pivotal in shaping the list of contents for this edition. I would like to record my gratitude for all of those who contributed quotes, ideas and interviews to this book. These include: Antoni Bick, Thomas Black, Scott Brant, John Paul Breed, Paul Brown, Lee Caines, Daniel Cogan, James Gess, Jon Hill (Polaris), Tom Hough, Tracey Hough, Simon Hull, Jason Layton, Brett Lovegrove, Seth Martin, Paul Morgan, Chris Phillips, Robert Newman, Lisa Reilly, Thomas Richmond, Rob Scott (SCG Security), Adam Smith, Jason Towse (Mitie Total Security), John Tristram and Andy Williams (ex-Marriott EMEA security director).
Some have chosen to remain uncited.
I do also wish to specifically thank my publishers at IT Governance, including Vicki Utting, for her patience and compassion, as my book deadline did require a couple of extensions, following the passing of my father, Randal Bingley. A big further ‘thank you’ to my mother, Amanda Bingley, who has provided me with consistent love and support. My final ‘thank you’ is directed toward PC Milena Bauerova, of London’s famous Metropolitan Police Service. PC Bauerova came to my rescue during a sunny afternoon in June 2013, on London’s picturesque Hampstead Common. Clearly, without her kind intervention back then, this book may never have witnessed the light of day.
The errors in this material are all mine.
Richard Bingley, London, 2015