The Living Link: How “People Problems” Impact Security
Sponsored
The following stories are based on real security failures witnessed by Garrett personnel, but customers have been anonymized to protect confidentiality.
With seven years of experience in the security industry, I am by no means the most veteran analyst of security issues, but when you work at a company with as much history and reach as Garrett Metal Detectors, you hear some crazy stories. Some make us chuckle, some make us groan, but all of them contain teachable moments. One common theme among these stories is the human element – ranging from the crowd pacers to the C-Suite executives. The care and attentiveness of the people involved makes all the difference in how the security ecosystem performs. Machines can do a lot, but they don’t care about security – only people can do that. If you want results, you need to be willing to assess your own performance. By assessing the pitfalls of others, we can learn how to care more about our own security and get more out of any investment we make into keeping our people, systems, and capital safe.
Lesson 1: Taking Ownership
This is a story I heard early in my time at Garrett – within the first six months – and it’s easy to see why. We sold hand-held metal detectors to a bank in the Caribbean but kept receiving complaints about faulty equipment. We provided replacements, but these too began to experience mysterious mechanical faults. Garrett prides itself on high levels of product reliability, so we asked the bank to investigate. After reviewing their security footage, they discovered the reason for the broken units. Their night watchmen, likely bored and unsupervised for long stretches of time, had noticed the vaguely sword-like shape of our SuperWand, and had taken up metal detector sword fighting to pass the time. While the SuperWand is a reliable and easy to use product that is well-suited for bank security, it is not built for battle. To avoid further destruction of guard equipment, we shipped them the more rugged Super Scanner V, which we advised would be more resistant to future duels.
For the bank’s part, the human error that needed correction was ownership – their guards were not treating their equipment with the appropriate level of care. Though humorous in retrospect, it is important for security teams to be instilled with a sense of the seriousness of their mission and the consequent understanding that their equipment is a tool, not a toy. Boredom is understandable, but professionalism in the use of equipment will keep it functioning at peak condition longer and in more adverse circumstances. Your employees probably know better than to use a bookcase as a ladder or a flashlight as a drumstick, and they should treat their tools with same respect, recognizing that their job performance and the safety of the facility they protect depends on it.
Lesson 2: Training for Reality
The next example I’ve witnessed firsthand more than a dozen times, so I expect more than one reader to recognize this issue from one of their own local venues. The problem with this scenario is easy to miss, so see if you can spot the mistake. A patron enters a stadium, passing through a walk-through metal detector, which alarms. He is directed by staff to a nearby secondary screening station where another guard uses a hand-held metal detector to screen his whole body for the object that causes the alarm. The object is located, the patron cleared, and the checkpoint operation continues as normal.
What’s wrong with this scene? Every staff member seems to be doing what they’ve been trained to do, but that’s the issue. If you know anything about walk-through metal detectors, you know that any detector with a hint of sophistication is going to tell you not just that there was a metallic object, but where it is located. So why did the secondary screener scan the whole body? Likely, he or she did so because they were trained in how to screen a whole person. But when you have both primary and secondary screening, you should almost never need to screen the whole person, as the walkthrough alert will tell the secondary screener where on the body to search. Doing this significantly speeds up the process, enhancing checkpoint throughput, improving patron experience, and reducing guard fatigue. If screening training considered the full security ecosystem and didn’t operate in product-based silos, this stadium would achieve a better result for all involved parties.
Lesson 3: Inculcating Vigilance
The Dallas area, where Garrett Metal Detectors is based, is home to a wide variety of seasonal fairs and festivals. At these events, Garrett employees always have a somewhat unique insider perspective on the security we encounter at the entrance. This particular story came to me from a member of my own marketing team who recently visited a local fair with weapons detection screening. As he passed through security, he divested his camera and camera bag for the bag checker to search. When the bag checker saw the bag and started to open it, the employee told him what was in the bag – meaning to encourage the guard to handle his equipment with care. Instead, the guard accepted his explanation and returned the camera bag without a search.
This Garrett employee wasn’t a bad actor, but he told me after the fact that it had disturbed him that his bag wasn’t searched. He knew very well that he could have concealed a firearm and several magazines of ammunition in that bag, and the fact that someone who was supposed to be working to keep him safe didn’t double-check his story caused him to doubt the security of the whole event. That isn’t unreasonable, because security is not supposed to accept alibis uncritically from people who could be smuggling threats into their facility. Security guards need to be confident enough in their mission and training to not shortcut processes just because a patron offers them an easy explanation. This kind of vigilance must come from the top, and supervisors need to be actively discouraging “lazy” screening to avoid the degradation of their security ecosystem.
Lesson 4: Leading from the Top
Sometimes, you can have a security team that takes ownership of their equipment, thinks practically about their security, and maintains vigilance in their mission of keeping people safe, and it still isn't enough. The most common reason is one of the most uncomfortable truths in the industry – some people in charge just don’t care that much about security – at least not as much as they say they care. We’ve encountered stadiums in the past which set their metal detector sensitivity well below any threshold that would allow them to detect threats reliably because they had another, higher goal: throughput. The math is simple and vicious when patrons spend all their concessions money after going through security, and the pressure to get crowds in quickly is enormous. It is undoubtedly easier to squint at threats than to do the hard work of improving processes to get the desired results, and the C-Suite simply does not have the luxury of ignoring the bottom line. But the security of many venues would be dramatically improved if CEOs, senior administrators, and others would discipline themselves to attend more to the effectiveness of their security than its convenience. There’s little meaning and little honor in investing in security that is optics-only.
Of course, not all senior personnel think this way. At Garrett, we have had the pleasure of working with thousands of leaders with genuine vision for a safer tomorrow for their people and facilities. But we do see the difference when that vision is lacking, and it impacts security for the worse in innumerable ways, large and small. There is no substitute for leadership that cares.
In fact, there’s just no substitute for caring, period. From senior leadership dictating policy from a remote office all the way to the guard checking bags at the entrance, it matters that the team cares. Teams that care, learn. They learn from the mistakes of others, and they learn from their own mistakes. We at Garrett care, which is why we were the first metal detector manufacturer to provide free online training for our security products, why we were the first in the industry to offer a 3-year standard warranty on all of our detectors, and why we continue to develop new technologies that advance the security conversation in meaningful ways. We’ve been learning from you: the integrator, the security supervisor, and the end user – your struggles and triumphs – for more than forty years, and we want to keep giving back to the community that’s taught us so much. Our hope is that you find the stories and lessons we’ve learned helpful in building a safer future for the community you serve without the pain of making the mistakes that those stories reveal.
Sponsored