Perspective: Differences Between Safety, Security and Law Enforcement

In common discussions, security and safety are often used interchangeably. This leads to miscommunication, mistaken assumptions, and errors in planning. By definition, safety is the condition of being protected from or unlikely likely to cause danger, risk or injury to a person or group of people. From a corporate perspective, safety focuses on the control of recognized hazards in order to achieve an acceptable level of risk. Therefore, corporate safety practitioners focus on the prevention or investigation of accidents, incidents, and industrial hygiene and development of measures to reduce, eliminate or otherwise mitigate risk to an acceptable degree. Security, meanwhile, is the degree of protection from or resistance to threats or hazards that could be harmful or undesirable. The key distinction between the two is that the condition (safety) is only achieved when the safeguards (security) are effectively in place and are operational. In short, security is the process of ensuring safety. While the distinctions may seem small, they can have a huge impact in both cost and how implementation is approached.

Overall, physical protection systems established for security purposes employ a mixture of people, processes, and technologies to protect against threats. Such countermeasures are part of a four-step security process cycle: deter, delay, detect (and assess – because without proper assessment there really is no detection), and response. This leads us to the difference between Global Security (for those organizations that have an international presence. Physical Security, Corporate Security, et al can also be used here) and Law Enforcement from a organization’s perspective where the organization has an indigenous police force.

Global Security uses a strategic, overarching focus that emphasizes “prevention.” In other words, Global Security aims to emplace security countermeasures designed to deter a threat before it can manifest itself into a harmful outcome. These countermeasures can range anywhere from policies, procedures, and security awareness training up to the actual physical devices. Should deterrence fail, these same security countermeasures (if properly emplaced) are designed and constructed in such a manner as to provide protection in depth. This protection in depth aims to cause a sufficient time delay to be able to detect the threat. In an ideal world, this delay and detection by security countermeasures would allow sufficient time for the proper assessment of the threat by either contract security personnel or Law Enforcement so that they can generate a tactical response and intercept the threat before it can reach its intended target. Global Security also assists in the response by analyzing the incident and developing measures to enable the organization to effectively return to a state of normal operations as quickly as possible.

In the end, Law Enforcement plays an vitally important, if subordinate, role in the overall Global Security program in the corporate environment.

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