Safety and Security: The Intersection

Security and safety often go hand in hand, but sometimes they conflict. Here are ways to cooperate to achieve both departments' goals.

So one obvious task of smart management is to poke holes—the right holes—in these walls between security and safety. David ("Mike") Hager, enterprise security officer at Unisys, had a university client come in after the Virginia Tech shootings with an interest in using cameras and remotely controlled locks to advance student safety. The idea was to give safety officers enough intelligence to unlock the doors that might be impeding student evacuations while locking or relocking those that would confine the source of the threat—all without traveling physically to the doors in question. "This was a case of safety driving security, which does not happen that often," Hager says. (While the first iterations of the project design proved financially impractical, conversations are continuing.)

Safety and Security's Common Ground
Another useful exercise of management might be to find points of overlap between the two missions, identifying places where each can advance the mission of the other with small investments in training and equipment. For instance, the key operating responsibilities in the food sector are detecting food contamination, economic fraud (in which a contracted input is switched surreptitiously for a cheaper one) and threats to salability (bruising, spoilage). All these require high levels of surveillance, which means that almost everyone working on the floor of a food manufacturer or distributor is already so alert to unexplained and unexpected changes that security functions can be added cheaply. If you are already checking tank outlets to make sure they are capped (to avoid contamination from rain or dust), checking the locks on the caps is a small step.

However, as with cameras, gaining leverage across the cultural divide does not happen automatically. "Food defense" (this industry uses the term defense where other sectors use "security," since here the term security is used to refer to sustainability) hasn't been part of the traditional mind-set of food processing workers. "People just didn't think of calling the FBI," says Gary Ades, a food safety and defense consultant in Bentonville, Ark. John Spink, director of the Packaging for Food and Product Protection Initiative at Michigan State University, believes that managing the security-safety overlap in this sector requires defining and enforcing clear, simple, intuitive and routine communication procedures. If it is useful for protective purposes to know about unusual patterns in salability rejections, the right way to distribute that information is to gather and report it routinely, as opposed to leaving it to each worker to think through the merits of each specific case.