As we know, the janitorial staff are among the most helpful people to know when an active shooter incident occurs in a large building/facility such as a school, a hotel, a corporate park, a train station, or a retail mall. They’ve got keys to everything, they typically know every square inch of the building by heart, they know which doors automatically lock when closed, and how to remotely control a variety of mechanical elements such as the lighting system, the HVAC system, the PA system. There’s another group of folks who you might consider building a relationship with: the security team.
There is sometimes friction between police officers and security guards — this, despite the fact that cops are increasingly taking on ‘paid jobs’ as mall cops during off-duty hours — which can interfere with everyone’s ability to work together efficiently and effectively when it matters most.
In most major hotels, nearly every major corporate headquarters building, and just about everywhere else that could be a potential target, there is often a small security force walking the grounds and monitoring video surveillance cameras. Like the janitors who know which way the hinges on the doors open in just about every room in the place, those security guards know which areas are covered by video cameras, and which areas are not.
Any bad guys working in a team of more than one attacker would almost certainly contemplate turning the security office (in which all those monitors are displaying live feeds of every nook and cranny of the facility) into a de facto command post. Your security guard contacts can tell you:
A.) whether or not the room has been compromised, and
B.) if so, where you will be seen and where you won’t
During Thanksgiving weekend 2008, ten members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist organization slaughtered more than 160 people and wounded more than 300 others. They hit ten locations — including the world-famous Taj Mahal Palace Hotel and the Chhatrapati Shivaji train terminal. Nearly every movement of the attackers was captured on security camera. Whether or not the responding officers in India leveraged those assets is not my point here — they may have, and then again maybe they didn’t. My point is that here in our own country, we know we can learn from every incident.
Let’s learn from Mumbai that while sometimes those “rent-a-cops” are not the most tactically savvy individuals, they can be your ‘best friend’ as long as all the principals — the cops and the guards — know how to best collaborate.
