industry focus
Forum brings Police and security companies together
A new group has been launched to provide a forum through which Police and commercial security organisations can work closer together in London.
The Police & Security (PaS) Working Group has been formed to deliver an important part of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) Business Crime Strategy, announced in June.
The strategy calls for improved collaboration between law enforcement and business, and encourages businesses to work more closely and effectively with the Police through private security initiatives. PaS will be active initially across the Metropolitan Police area, but lessons learned there could be applicable more widely.
The PaS Working Group was launched at London’s City Hall in December and included contributions from Stephen Greenhalgh, Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime as well as leading figures from the security industry in London, and senior officers from the Met Police.
According to launch chairman Geoff Zeidler – previously boss at Securitas in the UK and chair of the British Security Industry Association and currently a non-exec director at the Security Industry Authority – PaS aims to build upon existing successful partnerships for mutual benefit through a number of pilots. The important role of Business Crime Reduction Partnerships and other crime reduction initiatives, shop watches and pub watches will be a key focus, with the aim of supporting the adoption of Best Practice, standards and training to support further growth of BCRPs and other partnerships between businesses, the Police and private security providers.
Said Zeidler: “There’s always a challenge when private and public sectors work together, and PaS aims to be a forum in which both can engage with each other and focus efficiently and effectively on areas of common concern. That will include developing standards, building close and effective working relationships, and identifying the wide range of capabilities that are available from the private sector and which represent a potentially vast resource to help prevent, and drive down crime.”
The event identified three initial ‘work streams’: a consultation to identify what capabilities individual participants can offer and what are the perceived enablers and barriers to their use; a project to identify existing local and national collaboration projects to improve coordination and define Best Practice; and the development of a ‘roadmap’ that establishes what success looks like and the steps needed to achieve it.
