FEATURE STRATEGIC SECURITY
Simon Marr, Divisional Director of Risk and Security at WYG, examines safeguarding techniques to consider when protecting your business and staff against terrorism.
The recent media coverage of the armed attack by Nasim Najafi Aghdam at YouTube’s Californian headquarters, in which three YouTube staff were shot and wounded, is yet another reminder of the potential threats and dangers to employees in the workplace. This type of attack is not a new phenomenon. The Charlie Hebdo office attack in Paris in January 2015, where terrorists killed 11 people and wounded a further 11, wasn’t that long ago, and not a month seems to pass without a mass shooting incident at a US school.
Away from the workplace in crowded public spaces, there were assaults by marauding attackers in Westminster and on London Bridge last year, the abhorrent targeting of the Bataclan concert in Paris in November 2015, and the armed terror attack in Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi in 2013; these mass casualty incidents were motivated by either political ideologies or personal grievances, but the outcome was still the same – the assassination or wounding of vulnerable employees or bystanders.
An active shooter is defined by the United States of Homeland Security as, ‘an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area; in most cases, active shooters use firearms and there is no pattern to their selection of victims’. It’s a chilling and sobering definition and we should never underestimate the threats and dangers posed by such an attack.
The UK’s national threat level for international terrorism remains at severe. An attack is highly likely - or put another way, it’s not a matter of ‘if’, but ‘when’. Despite the very best efforts of the UK security services to foil terror plots, we have to accept that such attacks, whatever their motivation, will continue for the foreseeable future at home and overseas.
UK employers have a legal obligation under the Health & Safety Act 1974 ‘to ensure, so far as is reasonably
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practicable, the health, safety and welfare at work of employees’. And Regulation 8 of the Management of Health & Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires that every employer (and subsequently any person in control of premises) shall ‘establish and where necessary give effect to appropriate procedures to be followed in the event of a serious and imminent danger to persons at work in his undertaking’.
“AN EMPLOYER WILL WANT TO TAKE
PRACTICAL STEPS TO PLAN AND PREPARE FOR AN ATTACK AS PART OF EMERGENCY CONTINGENCY PLANS.”
PROTECTING YOUR
EMPLOYEES Given the prevailing threat and the associated legislative responsibilities, an employer will want to take practical steps to plan and prepare for an attack of this nature as part of emergency contingency plans. Given the speed and random nature of active shooter attacks, such plans cannot rely on the immediate protection or involvement of the appropriate security authorities, because there will always be a short time gap between the start of an attack and the arrival of a police response. And it’s in this timeframe that the attacker will seek to inflict the most damage on those in the workplace or a crowded public space. In order to protect their staff effectively, employers should focus on three areas of preparation and mitigation: briefing and training employees, building security access control measures and incident response protocols.
PREPARING YOUR EMPLOYEES The UK Counter Terrorism Police and National Police Chief’s Council
(NPCC), have produced very clear and simple guidelines for individuals to follow in the event that they are caught up in a terror attack:
RUN to a place of safety. This is a far better option than to surrender or negotiate. If there’s nowhere to go, then…
HIDE Its better to hide than to confront. Remember to turn your phone to silent and turn off vibrate. Barricade yourself in if you can. Then finally and only when its safe…
TELL the police by dialling 999
There are also further practical actions that employers can take including cascading the NPCC guidance to employees, perhaps as part of on-going security campaigns and using the NPCC training material and videos for employee briefings. You should also make training opportunities available where employees can better understand and familiarise themselves with their building’s floor plans, safe areas, emergency exits, stairwells and possible evacuation routes.
The citizenAID app has been designed by military and civilian doctors and was launched as a free app in January 2017. It reinforces the NPCC guidance, providing clear and simple instructions on the immediate RUN-HIDE-TELL steps. It also gives instructions on how to give life-saving first aid to the injured and advice on what to do on discovering a suspect bomb, as well as the immediate actions to take after a bomb has exploded.
SECURITY AND ACCESS
CONTROL Those responsible for the security of premises will want to ensure that appropriate protocols are in place and thoroughly understood by employees. Having procedures in place for alerting the security authorities and effectively communicating to employees in the event of an emergency, through
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