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School Assessment

Arming the Office – What Happens When We Let Employees Bring Guns to Work

Posted on March 30, 2011 12:25 am by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

One of my colleagues wrote to me so passionately about the terrible gun violence he witnesses every day, that I wanted to share it with all of you.  You can call it a ‘Guest Blog’ from the Field — a Hospital Security Director in a Major U.S. City.

The gun lobby had several recent legal “wins” for the gun rights advocates in Texas, Indiana, and Tennessee.   Apparently lawmakers and gun rights advocates find it a sane and reasonable  policy to open up the workplace to armed employees.

It t is also clear that our lawmakers are not satisfied with our current national gun carnage. Currently, we shoot to death about a 100 people a day in the United States, including 25 children killed every three days.  And this tally accounts for only those killed by guns.

This doesn’t include all those I see on a daily basis who are shot, crippled, maimed and ruined by the daily shooting gallery in the USA.   In order to continue to make money and sell more guns, the gun rights advocates, and  the legislators they have paid off, corrupted and stripped of reason,  are intent on even greater carnage and human tragedy.

Every day I witness the extreme becoming mainstream, and even commonplace.  
Guns are now finding their way into the workplace, brought into churches, brought into our colleges and universities. They are brought to hospitals, and shot off over highway bridges.

The logic is totally missing.  We are already a nation awash in fear and loathing.  We hate people  we don’t know and don’t understand.  The answer to this problem is NOT to arm EVEN MORE people and have guns readily available to everyone.

Obviously, the recent horrors of Arizona and the slaughter of innocent people in a Safeway parking lot,  has already been forgotten by security professionals and criminologists.  There is no condemnation or follow up  about a terminally troubled young man and the ease in which he purchased a semi-automatic pistol and 30 shot clips.

There has been no rallying cry to address the ease in which tormented and troubled and dangerous individuals on the margins of our society can easily obtain weapons of human mass destruction.   These realities are not relevant and cannot be discussed. And in today’s political climate to even MENTION this makes one a pariah, or a “liberal”, or a “communist”.

 I have been in the Security and Prevention profession for over 35 years, so I can easily dismiss the attacks from gun rights advocates and zealots.  And in fairness,  I have found many gun rights people to be in fact reasoned and decent and willing to engage in reasoned discourse.

What troubles me, and why I wanted to write directly to YOU,  is that the vast majority of professionals in the Security profession totally bypass, ignore and in fact, minimize the reality and tragedy that is our national gun slaughter.   As a profession,  we have done nothing to challenge these trends,  or address them, or at the very least,  debate the current flood of laws designed to turn American work places into armed camps.  

And this in my view is nothing less than a tragedy.



School Security Assessments & Children

Posted on July 18, 2008 7:26 pm by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

My children are out of schools now, but I am always shocked at what I see on CNN’s Nancy Grace Show — all the terrible people who are snatching little girls on their way home from school.  And what about the janitorial staff in some schools who don’t take time for the routine background check and find later that these men just rotate through the different schools looking for young victims.

I have been discussing this with some of my ASIS friends who do these types of assessment and they agree that  sometimes it seems like the school management is not interested in a REAL security assessment, but instead just wants to punch the ticket so they can say it’s been done. 

Conversely, they also find organizations who want to justify an expensive camera system, but totally ignore the basics….One of my friends wrote to me and said, “I have  yet to see a school that has not spent a few thousand on detection systems to  protect a few thousand dollars of computers but nothing on educating the staff  and students on how to respond to critical events in conjunction with the  first responders”.  

He continued…. “ 99% of all of the school vulnerability assessments I have performed shows
is this:  CCTV and Access Control systems are truly useful tools,  but they follow the principle of responding after the horse has left the barn, when they should be putting time and smaller amounts of money into such  things as fencing and meaningful emergency exercises to prevent and mitigate  the threats.  Dependence upon electronics is lulling the schools into a  false sense of security – the real assets aren’t the computers – the real  assets are the kids and staff.  An effective true vulnerability risk assessment would show the way to making more informed decisions”.

The same thing happens to organizations who want to spend money on fancy, shiny, IT stuff, instead of doing boring things like:

1.  Making sure the staff gets enough training.
2.  Making sure that security plans are updated annually.
3.  Updating the background checks.

Controls that cost less than $1000 are usually ignored for big purchases like digital color camera systems.  We had one incident I remember where the organization had already paid for and installed the fancy camera system, but no one was available to do the monitoring!

Training in how to use new systems is also another area that often gets neglected and it is probably the SINGLE, MOST IMPORTANT PART of any new system.   More than one organization didn’t keep using the new visitor management system because the staff never took the training and didn’t understand how to use it.  Without that training, you might as well save your money.

And while we’re on schools – I actually got a letter from a big inner-city school district, and it was on letterhead and it said, “We regret that we cannot do a security risk assessment but we feel that if we identified particular risks, we might be liable if we did not fix them in a timely manner.”

YES – if you identify a terrible security problem and don’t fix it – you could be held responsible – but what if you have three teachers killed, or three students – Security shouldn’t just be about liability.  It should actually FIX something.

One of the more successful schools assessment projects I have seen lately is down in Florida, where one of the schools is involving parents, as well as staff, in the school security program.  There are online security guides that parents have to view, and they actually track it to make sure the parents are taking the online security training.  

I got re-interested in the schools when I saw an HBO documentary on a Baltimore school that was having problems complying with the No Child Left Behind legislation, it’s called “Hard Times at  Douglass High”. It outlined many of the problems that large city schools have to face, and although the documentary didn’t focus on security, security is always an issue.

Again, it’s the risk assessment that can give a school, whether it’s a public school, private school, magnet school or charter school a good overview of the security controls they have in place and what they need to do to improve.   By setting up a program that REGULARLY assesses the school’s security profile, and does a cost benefit analysis on potential controls, the school will go a long way in protecting the interests of the students, the staff and the parents.




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