She’ll Be Right
Chris Proctor, Head of Visitor Safety, Regional Facilities Auckland, presented at a recent ASIS New Zealand Chapter breakfast meeting on behaviour detection. It’s a game-changing skill, he writes, that the industry needs to be developing.
“The biggest threat to security is the general lack of belief that any significant threat exists.” This was a phrase I used a lot when briefing new British Army arrivals into Northern Ireland in the mid-1980s – part of their security induction into a high-threat environment.
It’s funny that they all expected to come into contact with terrorism during their working lives in Northern Ireland, but not in their personal, off-duty time. It was this ‘head in the sand’ mentality that I was trying hard to debunk.
Unfortunately, one of my other duties was interviewing the families of victims of off-duty terrorist attacks, and this showed me that the lessons were not always learned.
Why do I start on this dark note? Well, unfortunately, that ‘head in the sand’ attitude is something that I have noted in my short time within the security industry in New Zealand – the ‘she’ll be right’ factor, if you will.