Threat Analysis Group, LLCon





Archive for August, 2011

Date: August 30th, 2011
Cate: Crime Prevention

Super Controllers and Crime Prevention

Security Journal has an excellent article entitled:  Super controllers and crime prevention: A routine activity explanation of crime prevention success and failure.

Why does crime prevention fail? And under what conditions does it succeed? Routine Activity Theory provides the foundation for understanding crime and its patterns by focusing on variations in the convergence of offenders, targets and controllers in space and time. But Routine Activity Theory does not provide a full understanding of why the controllers may be absent or ineffective. This article expands Routine Activity Theory to explain controllers. It claims that the behaviors of controllers can be understood in the context of their relationship with super controllers – those who regulate controllers’ incentives to prevent crime. The article lists and describes types of super controllers. Drawing on a rational choice perspective and Situational Crime Prevention, the article examines the methods super controllers use to regulate the conduct of controllers. Examples are used throughout to illustrate specific points and to show the diversity of super controlling. This article concludes with a discussion of the implication of super controllers for the practice of crime prevention and research into crime reduction methods.

Security Journal

Date: August 23rd, 2011
Cate: Security, Uncategorized

Security Staffing Approaches

A new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) identifies various security staffing approaches used by government agencies.  The purpose of the report was to assist the Federal Protective Service improve their security staffing efforts.  However, some of the GAO’s findings are useful for the private sector, particularly their enumeration of benefits and challenges of contract and proprietary security forces.

 

Benefits of a contract security force include cost and personnel flexibility while proprietary security force benefits include staff selection, development and retention.  Interestingly, GAO identified the benefits of each staffing approach as the challenges of the other staffing approach.

 

“Early planning to determine security staffing needs and sufficient oversight were cited as key lessons learned when changing staffing approaches.”  Specifically, GAO identified the need for a risk-based assessment of the organization to identify administrative and training capabilities to support the security force.  “We have previously reported that assessing and determining facility security and staffing needs is a key practice and element in a risk management approach for allocating resources in facility protection.”  In the end, GAO’s findings indicate that “if the process is well managed, either an in-house or contract approach to staffing a security workforce can result in a uniform security workforce that provides effective security.”

 

GAO Report

 

Date: August 15th, 2011
Cate: Optimization/Metrics/ROI

Feedback Loops Enhance Security Efforts

A recent article on Feedback Loops in Wired Magazine suggests that is we “provide people with information about their actions in real time (or something close to it), then give them an opportunity to change those actions, pushing them toward better behaviors.”  This concept is the backbone of Crime Analysis which creates a site-specific crime feedback loop to optimize site-specific security programs.

 

According to the Wired article, “A feedback loop involves four distinct stages. First comes the data: A behavior must be measured, captured, and stored. This is the evidence stage. Second, the information must be relayed to the individual, not in the raw-data form in which it was captured but in a context that makes it emotionally resonant. This is the relevance stage. But even compelling information is useless if we don’t know what to make of it, so we need a third stage: consequence. The information must illuminate one or more paths ahead. And finally, the fourth stage: action. There must be a clear moment when the individual can recalibrate a behavior, make a choice, and act. Then that action is measured, and the feedback loop can run once more, every action stimulating new behaviors that inch us closer to our goals.”

 

Quantitative feedback loops (such as Crime Analysis) and qualitative feedback loops (such as victimization or fear of crime surveys) are essential to the development of an optimized security program.

 

 

Date: August 3rd, 2011
Cate: Uncategorized

What is a security mix?

A security mix is a combination of security measures that, when properly deployed, can effectively protect assets. A good security mix incorporates multiple types of security measures at sufficient levels to provide adequate security. Note the key phrase in the last sentence…at sufficient levels.

In a chapter I recently wrote for a Retail Security textbook, I discussed the concept of security overkill. Security overkill occurs when security measures are over-deployed given the level of risk to assets. However, security overkill is better than engaging in the  concept of security otherkill – where security resources are directed at a non-existent problem.