The debate about where to draw the line between public policing and private security is in uncharted waters, says Robert Davies, assistant chief constable at Thames Valley Police. At a BSIA seminar entitled “The Changing Face of Manned Security Services”, Davies provoked considerable controversy among the audience when he stated that the security industry lacked vision for the future.
Davies vision for the future is one where police officers work with a variety of public and private agencies to promote a safer and more confident community. “We don’t know how far we can go until we talk about what is the vision of the security industry and what is the vision of the police service,” he told SMT in an interview at Thames Valley Police Headquarters in Kidlington.
The vision
If the security industry has a vision of the future it is not being articulated for the benefit of policemen like Davies who wonder where the security industry wants to go. He would only give credit to a few companies in the security industry for actually looking at this question, among them Reliance Security.
“What I sense about the security industry is that there is an enormous potential for developing a visible presence of some type of patrol on the streets,” he says, an important consideration at a time when the visibility of police officers has been reduced due to new demands.
Davies believes, as does the newly-appointed deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Ian Blair (formerly chief constable of Surrey), that a police officer could at the centre of a community-based network of security officers, local authority wardens and other local agencies sharing information about crime and disorder in their area.
Technology will help this vision become a reality. A new digital radio system being deployed for police in 2001 would enable local police inspectors to have a channel dedicated to their “patch” and potentially involve, through radio communications, people inside shops, on patrol for private companies and others. “The potential for coordination is on another plane altogether,” he says.
Meanwhile, police could get involved in the training of security officers, on a commercial basis, and new communications technology such as the internet will make the sharing of resources and information much easier, “in the very near future”.
The drivers
What makes this attractive to senior police officers is the realisation that the private security industry has huge resources. It has been estimated that there are more uniformed security officers than there are uniformed police in the UK. Meanwhile police resources are not growing fast enough to keep pace with burgeoning demand.
“What we cannot do is continue to ignore the huge potential of the security industry at a time when demand is high and resources are at least limited, and not growing,” Davies says. “There is so much potential expertise and resource that we cannot ignore it. We must maximise the contribution from everyone.”
Davies’ view is that everyone in the community must share responsibility for crime prevention — it makes sense socially and financially.
Where we are now
The private security industry and the police are currently taking the first tentative steps toward partnerships, but it’s a volatile area. The path must be tread with care to ensure that the public understand what is happening, agree that it is right and feel that they are not losing control of the issue, says Davies.
“I think we could go a lot further than we are at the moment, but that would depend on the security industry having a vision for the future,” he says. “The security industry hasn’t worked out where it wants to position itself with regard to patrol, and I think that this is a big challenge for it.”
Neither is the security industry taking an interest in the Crime and Disorder Act. At the BSIA’s “Changing Faces” seminar, only one person in the audience had read their local community safety strategy, which Davies found “surprising”.
Davies laments the fact that the security industry is not as well organised as it should be, considering that in size it is larger than all of the police forces in the UK combined. “The security industry is made up of lots of small businesses, and one of the challenges for the BSIA is how to represent them, how to get a coordinated vision from all the different structures,” he says.
Leadership lacking
We have always had a very strong recognition that maintaining order is not just about the police service. It's about a whole range of people being involved. The challenge facing us at a time of rising demand and very limited resources is that we have got
If the security industry isn’t providing much leadership on this issue, then the police certainly are. The Association of Chief Police Officers is making progress in considerations to involve private security in a limited range of public policing tasks, and last summer ACPO agreed some principles for how police forces could develop a two-tier approach to policing.
For its own part, Thames Valley Police is involved in several schemes with private security companies. Davies explains that in the draft plan, the mission statement spells out the goal of the various partnerships: “to promote contributions by other appropriate partners to complement our patrol function and so promote public confidence and safety”.
Within the framework, the Thames Valley police are able to work to a variety of different models, depending on which is best suited to their area. Currently, Thames Valley are working with Reliance Security, at the Slough Trading Estate, to work out codes of practice for the company to respond to alarm activations at business premises outside the boundaries of the estate. In future, Thames Valley and Reliance could be linked by radio, with Reliance taking on more patrolling functions.
Opposition
Not everyone is as excited about partnerships between the police and the private security industry as Davies and Blair.
The Police Federation, which represents rank and file officers, have been opposed to the idea since it was first mooted. Fred Broughton, chairman of the Police Federation, told SMT: “The Police Federation belives the best way of policing the community is to have uniformed officers walking the beat, backed by all the modern technology and support services that are available. It does not support ‘policing on the cheap’ with private security firms used as alternatives to police.”
Davies believes this is wrong: “Everything from the creation of the police to the special constabulary shows that a nation can afford to spend only so much money on a full-time police service... We don’t exist to have a big police force; we get paid to create safer, more confident communities. That’s the sole purpose of having a police service.”
Davies is disappointed that newspapers have mostly concentrated on opposition to the idea, rather than featuring the arguments in favour of it. “What has been written is about chief constables who have said no, no, no, and a reluctance to upset the Federation or ACPO, but what the newspapers haven’t done is spell out what it is hoped to achieve.”
Some people within the security industry itself are opposed to the idea. One delegate at the “Changing Faces” seminar told Davies point-blank that he “wouldn’t touch public patrols with a barge pole”.
And there’s the question of who is going to pay for it. The police don’t want to dip into their budgets to pay for it, and Davies himself has said that he’d oppose any attempt to reduce police officer numbers. He wants to see the money come from interested parties, such as private business, local government and central government departments with an interest in crime prevention. “There is a recognition that all aspects of government have a part to play in creating safer communities,” he says.
“It’s about leaders recognising what are the outcomes that they want, and how do we get there? Is it better spending £100,000 of local authority money on a type of patrol in suport of police rather than having £150,000 worth of criminal damage to repair, or a major problem with drug addiction?”
Communicating the vision
The Crime and Disorder Act has been in force for a year, and yet there is not much of a public debate going on about how to implement it. How many people are even aware of it?
Davies feels that the local authorities are not doing enough to promote an awareness and understanding of what they are doing within the context of their community safety strategies. This may be due to the fact that local authorities are struggling to come to grips with another Government doctrine, Best Value, which is occupying much of their time.
Nonetheless, says Davies, not enough articles are being written at the strategic level, in the national newspaper, about the Crime and Disorder Act and public/private partnerships.
To be fair, not a lot of work has been done by the police on this, either, because attention has been focussed on Best Value and because in police circles private patrols are one of the “hotter potatoes”, explains Davies: “You only pick this one up if you are performing well or you feel that the time is right.”
The future
In two years the regional community safety strategies, born out of the Crime and Disorder Act, will be due to be revised, and some work needs to be done to figure out how to involve the private security industry, Davies says. In this round of publications, the strategies were mostly limited to a police vision. Next time he hopes that the security industry and local authorities, having seen how they operate and having an idea of what a shared vision might be, will take a more active role.
Source
SMT
