Issue 01 | The Refraction

Welcome to the first issue of The Refraction.

If you are reading this, you signed up before there was anything to read. You took the word of a guy who promised a newsletter and a different way of looking at security.

Every week you will get one real argument in the Main Article, one small operational move you can put to work this week in Touring, a quick read on a development that actually matters in Signals, and a passdown from a career officer named Ricky who has opinions about all of it. Useful, honest, and written by someone who has walked the rounds.

This newsletter is meant to bring attention to areas of security that we don't always talk about, see, or sometimes even know exists. Some topics I have lined up include how terrorism insurance actually works, AI in the command center, and how cognitive biases impact our ability to be effective security practitioners.

This week we start with a question that sounds cynical but isn't. Who are security guards actually protecting? Read on.

Thanks for being here from the beginning.

Nate

I read an article syndicated in USA Today recently about how underpaid security guards are. For the life-saving work they do, they should absolutely be paid more. But why are security guards paid so little? It can't be that the system was designed that way… right?

You used to find security guards only in places with high-value goods, like banks and corporations, or locations with high volatility such as hospitals. Now we see them at grocery stores, doctor's offices, and even fast food restaurants.

It is not that the value of the Big Macs that might get stolen exceeds the pay rate of the officer standing by the door. It is that the franchise's insurance mandated a security presence.

Every organization that invites the public onto its property owes those people a reasonable standard of safety. It's not just a nice thing to do, it's legal exposure. When something goes wrong and a lawyer starts asking what the organization did to prevent it, the organization needs an answer. A uniformed guard is an answer you can point to that lets the general counsel stand up and say, "Yes, we recognized the risk, and that is why we posted security." Guards are cheap and plentiful.

Security guards aren't about protecting people, they're about protecting organizations from liability.

This is why security is undervalued, and it is partly our own fault as a profession. We talk about security in tactics. Put Emily on the north entrance, move Chet to the dock, and tour every hour. I've both written those post orders and sat in the room where the post gets justified, and the two conversations don't sound anything alike.

The C-suite generally doesn't care where guards are posted. Senior executives think in duty of care, foreseeability, the elements of negligence, deductible exposure, and ROI. Those are the terms the decision actually gets made in, and most of us never learn to speak them. The context for those decisions, more often than not, comes from the insurance company.

Think about that for a second. A professional body can publish a standard and hope you adopt it, and a state can pass a statute and wait for an inspector to enforce it someday. The carrier writing your liability policy can simply make a security presence a condition of coverage, and if you want to be insured, you comply by Friday. No hearing, no comment period, no enforcement lag. The premium invoice IS the enforcement mechanism.

It runs the other way too. Hire enough security, and a carrier may decide you have gone above and beyond and offer a discount. Often that has little to do with how complete your security posture actually is, unless you hold an accreditation or certification that proves to the underwriter you have earned the lower premium.

But more guards does not mean more secure. It's your policies that have to guide what the guard actually does. If your policies are thin and your security fails during an incident, you're not looking at just a security failure, you're looking at a stack of attorney fees. Strong policies are needed to tell guards what to do and how they are expected to protect the organization.

The system is working exactly as designed. Insurance requires a physical security presence, and a cheap guard is a way to tick that box.

So security guards are getting paid correctly, given how the system is set up. Is it the best system? Certainly not. They're paid for what the system is actually buying, which is a liability checkbox, not true protection.

As my friends in tech say, low security guard pay is a feature, not a bug.

Most security problems are documentation problems wearing a costume. The officer remembers the visitor came in around two. The complaint names a time the officer cannot account for. The incident report gets written three hours later from memory. All of it traces to the same gap, which is the absence of a contemporaneous record.

The move is the simplest one there is. Issue every officer a pocket notebook and a pen and tell them to use it liberally. Times, names, plate numbers, observations, who said what and when. Not only during incidents. All shift, as a standing habit.

It is worth saying plainly that many officers are never given a notebook and pen at all, or are handed them and never told to use them. That is a program failure, not an officer failure, and it costs almost nothing to fix.

The implementation cost is pennies per officer. The return shows up everywhere downstream. A jotted time and observation resolves a he said she said, sharpens the incident report, supports an investigation, and stands up far better in a complaint or a claim than memory ever does. The act of writing also sharpens what the officer notices in the first place. Capture two things. Whether every officer actually carries a notebook, and whether those notes feed the incident log rather than dying in the book.

A regulator just put a price on an unprepared security program.

On June 7, Cal/OSHA fined Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital about $130,000 for serious workplace-violence-prevention violations, six months after social worker Alberto Rangel was fatally stabbed on Ward 86. Investigators called the hospital "utterly unprepared." The fine isn't the number that matters.

The hospital had already been cited for workplace violence in 2020, and staff said safety proposals were raised and ignored. A known risk, documented warnings, and no closed loop is the exact pattern that turns a tragedy into a finding of negligence, and the $130,000 is a rounding error next to the roughly $22.5 million the city committed the week after.

Workplace violence prevention in healthcare is an enforced standard in California now, and the rest of the country is moving the same way. The regulator is not asking whether an incident happened, they're asking whether you saw it coming and what you did about it.

Pull your last two years of incident reports and ask of every flagged concern whether it was closed out and whether you can prove it. Foreseeability is built from your own records.

Hi Allie. Passdown for night shift. Mikey says these are supposed to be three lines so I am keeping it short this time.

Cameras on four and five were wonky but the cables just needed to be pushed in. The thing I actually need you to know is the notebook thing. Mikey made us all start carrying little notebooks and writing everything down and I told him, "Mikey I can barely read my own handwriting half the time, so what's the point?"

But then last night Joey wrote down that some guy had a huge tattoo on his whole face was loitering in the parking lot. Later the same guy comes back trying to lift stuff out of the lobby shop with half his face covered up, and Joey goes, that looks like cool dragon face tattoo guy. Honestly? Joey's drawing wasn't half bad.

So I guess write stuff down. Even the dumb stuff. The dumb stuff is what catches the guy.

And Mikey if Allie forwarded you this again, yes I used the talk to text, no I am not gonna stop, my thumbs do not work on that little keyboard and you are the one who wanted the notebooks.

Have a good one Allie! Where's the button for this thing? Oh here it-