Acing Security Risk Assessments

Your entire security mission is at risk when your security department doesn’t carefully evaluate the special risks facing each office, each production or distribution facility, or any other site. The dangers can be nearly as great if you plan your risk assessments poorly or execute them carelessly.

Site-specific risk assessments are a must for corporate security teams, whether you opt for a simple matrix or a highly detailed program. Your security staff must know all of the potential risks – from street crime to weather hazards – confronting each facility, their likelihood, and which risks are potentially more damaging to the business mission. Then, you must come up with practical options.

Devising a credible risk assessment that drives sound business decisions isn’t necessarily simple.

To whom can a security staff turn for insights and data about local threats? What is the underlying cause of those threats? How do you assign a probability to the most damaging events at each site? Are the solutions that security suggests practical from a cost standpoint?

Even the sharpest security teams need to constantly reevaluate how well they conduct risk assessments, and insights from respected peers can help.

Norman Bates is president and founder of Liability Consultants Inc., a Bolton, Mass.-based security management consulting firm. He is a frequent, court-certified expert witness for both plaintiff and defense firms on civil cases involving inadequate security or negligent hiring or training. Norman previously was an assistant professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University and chairman of the ASIS Boston chapter.

Jon Groussman is the president and COO of CAP Index Inc., a leading provider of data used in forecasting crime. In that job, he provides risk and liability mitigation, and security management, consulting to clients in both the private and public sectors. Jon previously worked as a VP and principal consultant at Liability Consultants Inc., as a loss prevention investigator for Saks Fifth Avenue and as an investigative aide for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Sal Lifrieri is president of Protective Countermeasures and Consulting Inc. in New Rochelle, N.Y., a threat and vulnerability advisory firm to companies. He previously was director of security and intelligence operations for New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s office of emergency management for five years, and before that was with the city’s municipal security section for two years. Sal is a retired New York Police Department officer and frequent instructor and lecturer before federal defense and security agencies.

Jon Lusher is a principal consultant and EVP of internal inspection and compliance for IPC International Corp., based in Bannockburn, Ill. IPC specializes in security services for shopping centers and Jon has personally supervised several hundred site risk assessments. Previously in his career, he worked as a regulator and security director in the thoroughbred racing industry and was a Baltimore Police detective.

Basil Steele is deputy director of the weapons security program at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. He’s worked at Sandia since 1975 and, over time, held managerial roles in the security video assessment, intrusion detection systems areas and has been program manager for security programs overall. Basil also helped develop the ASIS security risk assessment guideline.

Our panel of veteran corporate security leaders and consultants, each with extensive experience in managing site-specific risk assessments, will prepare you to do decide:

• The relative advantages to a rudimentary evaluation that gets you going quickly, and a highly detailed process that leaves out no potentially important information.
• The right questions to ask when your security staff interviews employees about prospective threats.
• Whether your risk assessments are producing documents that can drive planning decisions on staff and systems.
• How to make sure employees fully understand and seriously prepare for the dangers your work reveals.

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