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Criminal Law in Ireland: An overview for security operatives

Following on from last weeks article on civil law and liabilty I’m going to do a series of articles on areas of Irish law and how it affects the role of the security operative. In this industry knowledge is power and blindly following the instruction of a supervisor or SOP when it comes to matters of law is not good enough. To apply legal principles at work we must have an underlying understanding much deeper than the law we are applying. In this article I’m going to take a look at the fundamentals of criminal law. The defining criteria for an act to be a crime and the various classifications of crime and their meaning to the security operative. This is not going to delve into specific parts of criminal (I’ll do that later) but it is an overview of the basic principles of criminal law and how it differs from civil law.
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Duty of Care, Negligence and Liability in the Security industry

Duty of care

This week I’m going to go all legal and talk about duty of care. These 3 words on which a significant amount of business in the security industry are based. The words are used over and over in operations records, assignment instructions and legal issues around the security industry but how much does the average security operative know about what these words mean. In this article I want to look at duty of care from a civil law perspective.

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Security operative questions answered: March 2018

I said last week that I had gotten a number of question that I felt was best answered in a public forum. These are the questions I have received both before and since I made that announcement. Everything from safety boots to guard dogs and a few more in between. As always I advise you not just to take my answers at face value. I give you my answers based on my experience and research and you should do the same. Take my answers and use them as the basis to research your own. As always I’m open to your feedback and to any ideas you may have on any of these subjects.

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Business Continuity Basics

The subject of business continuity has never been more to the forefront in Ireland and the UK than this week. The so called Beast from the East and storm Emma have combined to cost many millions in damage and possibly hundred of millions in lost revenue and income. For businesses big and small there will have been lessons learned and mistakes made. In this article I want to talk about some of those lessons not just from a business point of view but also from an individual employee point of view. We all have a part to play in keeping our businesses afloat and learning lessons will become more important as the reality of these extreme weather events become more commonplace.

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Principles of Effective Security

Last week I printed a photo online of my ‘ 5 Principles of Effective Security’. It received a huge amount of feedback online and in private (including the few who spotted my grammar mistakes in the text). I printed it following a conversation with a fellow security professional where I was talking about principle based training. I mentioned my 5 principles and he liked them. Then I realised that despite using these principles as the basis for most of my training and operational work for many years I had never talked about them on this page. In this article I’m going to do just that. I’ll talk about my top  5 principles (and one extra one) and why I believe in principle based training.

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