The other day I read some information that malls across the country will begin to train their security personnel re: terrorists, such as how to recognize possible terrorists. One of the topic item mentioned was about persons wearing overcoats on hot days. Come on now - security personnel would, I hope, at least that person as an active or potential shoplifter!

These malls working to give their personnel that specialized training are kind of forgetting what security is supposed to do during the regular work. Did they forget the basic "observe and report" duty of security personnel? It's bad enough that mall security officers are not unknown to make mistakes, resulting in civil and/or criminal complaints, but to take away their concentration on what is, or should be, important to mall management - protection of the bottom line - so that security people can now be an arm of Homeland Security, is unquestionably foolish.




Mall security don't need to be trained as ant-terorism specialists. If they are doing their job properly, they will observe that which does not look right. Sure, we may not want them willy-nilly picking up stray boxes and brief cases, but if they're not sure of what to do, they should call their local cooperating law enforcement people.

I've trained a lot of mall and retail store security people over the years, and, not to take anything away from them (I've even had mall security people take part in our armed hostage taker training programs), but these security officers have plenty on their plate, and to start having them break down various "signals" of possible trouble, can, and probablyibly will, lead to less effective operations.

Let security do its job as it should be done. The rest will take of itself.