GRIFFIN WORLDWIDE


Since Project Griffin was launched in London in 2004, its outstanding success has encouraged police forces, businesses and security services across the UK, and increasingly throughout the world, to adopt the programme. Interest in the concept has grown internationally to the point that it has become a global benchmark in using a partnership approach to deliver an effective counter-terrorism strategy.


Project Griffin has been described as an internationally transferable template and a blueprint for co-operation which can be adapted and applied even in contexts where counter-terrorism is less of a priority. Different countries have since developed their own counterpart schemes to meet their own localised requirements.


In Australia, where the private security industry has more trained and licensed officers than all the Australian police and military forces combined, the Counter-terrorism and Emergency Management Division of Victoria Police has adopted the Project Griffin model


to train security officers in threat identification and terrorism awareness. As in the UK, Griffin-trained security personnel may be called upon for emergency response in the event of a major incident such as a terrorist attack. Their responsibilities include access control and manning police cordons, so enabling smarter use of police resources in the aftermath of an attack. In addition, the South Australia Police force received an award for the best public-private partnership for Project Griffin.


In Canada, the Vancouver Police Department began drawing on the Project


Griffin experience in 2009 and applying it to the combating of property crime as well as terrorist activity. Private security firms, volunteers from the Community Policing Centre and other security-screened groups receive special training to assist the city’s police in the event of a major terrorist alert. The Project Griffin name has been retained and its mission defined as that of increasing public safety ‘by supplying security-minded organisations and groups with information and support in order to assist them in their crime prevention efforts’. The training focuses on the key areas of basic suspect identification, communication protocol,


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