Distractions

Guards can be easily distracted from their job, unfortunately. Beautiful people, well meaning people, relatively minor incidents masking more serious ones, intentional and situational distractions are to be expected by good security personnel. One must keep the job's priorities in mind.  I call it "area awareness". Just paying attention to the entire environment while handling each encounter or incident. This leads some folks to believe I am not paying 100% attention to them. They are right, my speaking to them about their new car or new baby is not my job. Being aware is my job and I'm on duty, Sorry. I try to be subtle about it.

I ran scenario training for guard staff; I found that the dispatcher had a tendency to dispatch all guards to every seemingly serious incident, unnecessarily.  [Serious?: Is anyone dead?, about to die?, lose mission critical information or material?, wreck the environment?]

A traffic accident requires, in most cases, 1-2 guards...not all 10 on duty. In my training scenarios 3 "serious" incidents occur within 3-10 minutes. This required the dispatcher or shift supervisor to prioritize response, assign people appropriately to handle each situation...and think about a reserve force and not taking guards from mission critical protective duties. A fire alarm, a heart attack, a rabid dog, a car fire, a naked woman in the apartment window across the street, a traffic accident, a trespasser, a screaming customer. This proved amazingly difficult for the staff and management to comprehend. "You can't comprehend that which you can't imagine". Imagine being distracted.

Management sometimes see the guards "standing around" and feel they must do something productive. [The guard standing there is doing something for the benefit of your firm!]  Like the lobby guard in the film "3 Days of the Condor", one can be assigned or take on voluntarily such duties as making coffee, signing for packages on the loading dock and a host of other non-security jobs. These are major distractions.