Experts offer insights on current security issues
Attendees at the ASIS annual event were offered the latest insights into the latest thinking on a range of security issues, from protecting the hospitality industry to protecting house of worship, and much more
If you want to know about what has been happening in the security field, what is happening now, and what is likely to happen in the future, then the ASIS annual meeting is the place for you (in between these meetings, a membership in the organization would keep you updated).
As Security Management’s Matthew Harwood notes, those attendees who wanted even more information about specific security topics made a point of arriving early in Anaheim to attend courses presented by experts on topics ranging from consulting to securing houses of worship. Harwood summarizes the presentations in these courses (or “intensives,” as ASIS calls them), which included:
Security consulting: in the “Successful Security Consulting” intensive, Richard Grassie, CPP, managing principal of Good Harbor Consulting, LLC, in Rockland, Massachusetts, told attendees that running a security consulting business can be rewarding. Starting a consulting business can be very tough in the beginning. “Stay focused and stay in the business,” he said. “The key is to have tenacity and to package your consulting company properly.”
Grassie, and Frank Pisciotta, president of Business Protection Specialists, Inc., in Raleigh, North Carolina, offered ideas about the good and bad aspects of starting a security consulting practice. Other topics covered in the two-day course included marketing a consulting service, developing an online presence, writing a business plan, viewing the business from an end-user perspective, and keeping abreast of consulting trends.
Hotel security: “Hotel Crisis Response and Tabletop Exercise,” led by Skip Brandt, CPP, of the ASIS Hospitality, Entertainment, and Tourism Council, talked about the latest in security issues relating to the hospitality industry. Brandt told attendees that his definition of a crisis “is anything that disrupts guest services.” To prove his point, Brandt conducted a tabletop exercise which offered a scenario in a 1,200-room hotel just after midnight when few employees were on duty. Those who were included a handful of bartenders and food servers, a few housekeeping employees, some engineers, a bellman, and three security officers. “In the middle of the night, this tiny staff is typical at a hotel,” Brandt said, and the problem for the first part of the exercise was how to best deploy these few workers and just what they could reasonably be expected to do during the crises. The problems this skeletal staff had to deal with included a loud argument in one of the guest rooms, a man leaving his room with a weapon in hand, leaving a woman shot in the room.
Managing in a crisis: Steven Layne, CPP, of
