Walking down your local high street, you might witness a scene that has become symptomatic of a deeper malaise. A shoplifter exits a supermarket with an armful of goods. The security guard, bound by corporate policy, is instructed not to intervene. The employer, prioritising reputation over asset protection, looks the other way. Meanwhile, bystanders gather to film the incident on their smartphones.
This moment of collective inaction is not a standalone event. It is a microcosm of a fracturing society. Social cohesion in the UK is under pressure, with only 27% of people in 2023 reporting high or moderately high trust in national government, well below the OECD average of 39%. A relentless 24-hour media cycle and a growing perception that institutions no longer serve the common good are eroding the foundations of shared responsibility. According to the Centre for Ageing Better, 4.2 million over-65s now live alone, moving us away from the multigenerational households that historically anchored communities.
Having spent thirteen years as an armed police officer and tactical advisor before moving into risk consultancy at The Keyholding Company, I have watched this shift play out across both the public and private sectors. When the social contract breaks down, security professionals are left trying to maintain order against a backdrop of public apathy.
The problem starts within
The very same erosion of collective responsibility that plays out in public life, lives inside our organisations. Before the introduction of the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025, counter-terrorism preparedness routinely fell through the cracks. Shared grey spaces – areas outside an organisation’s boundary but not clearly owned by the next organisation or public authority – were routinely ignored, with each party assuming responsibility lay elsewhere.
True operational resilience requires organisations to take collective responsibility for risk, but that cannot exist without trust. When staff do not trust they will be supported if they act, they do not act. When departments operate in silos, they may manage their own risks in isolation, unaware of how those risks connect to wider, overarching vulnerabilities.
Resilience, at its core, is what happens when those trust deficits are addressed. To address them, executive leaders and security directors must focus on three core pillars.
Train for the moments that matter
Training is often treated as an annual slide-deck exercise. This is a mistake. Standard compliance training tells people what to do, but it rarely gives them the confidence to do it when the pressure is on.
Public hesitation to perform CPR is a telling parallel. People rarely freeze because they lack humanity. They freeze because they fear hurting the person or getting it wrong and facing judgement. The exact same dynamic plays out across the security industry every day. Staff are terrified of making a mistake that may be filmed and scrutinised. To break this paralysis, we must take a different approach.
I have seen this work first-hand. In basic police training, staff safety was taught through repetitive physical drills. When I moved to firearms, everything shifted to scenario-based judgement training, where officers were asked not just what they did, but why. Feedback was delivered to educate, not to rebuke. When a situation arose for real, it felt like a task performed many times before. By the time I left the force 13 years later, that approach had filtered down into basic staff safety training across the board.
The model is simple: create the conditions for people to get it wrong safely, so that when it matters, they get it right.
Build trust by leading by example
Culture cannot be built from the middle. It must be modelled from the top. The most visible element of any security operation is the frontline officer at the barrier, yet they take their cultural cues from the executives above them, who do not always lead by example.
When leadership sidesteps security processes because they find them inconvenient, the message to those watching is that security is optional. And that attitude tends to extend further than most leaders realise. An organisation that houses its security function in a neglected room with outdated technology, operating on the lowest-cost contracts available, is sending a signal about its priorities.
Investment in people and environment is not a nice-to-have. It is a statement of intent. When leadership visibly respects the process and the people who uphold it, the rest of the organisation follows.
Martyn’s Law: the catalyst, not the ceiling
Martyn’s Law will not fix social cohesion, but it will do something that voluntary change rarely achieves: it will put this conversation on the agenda and keep it there. By mandating a responsible senior individual, it moves accountability away from an audit checklist and places it where it belongs, at the top of the organisation. The guidance is manageable, free resources are available, and organisations that begin now will be in a far stronger position than those who wait.
But Martyn’s Law should not be seen as the ceiling. Organisations that treat it as a baseline to build from, rather than a threshold to reach, will find it opens the door to exactly the kind of joined-up, organisation-wide security culture that is needed.
The health and safety parallel is striking. Nobody argues that health and safety frameworks are unnecessary, and the security industry is long overdue a similar legislative foundation – one that reflects the complexity of the threat environment it now operates in.
Change ripples outwards
We cannot fix the wider fractures of modern social cohesion from inside the walls of a single building. The scale of declining public trust is a problem that no security director can solve alone. But the argument here is not that security professionals must fix society. It is that if enough organisations build cultures where people feel trusted, trained, and supported to act, that can lead to wider societal change.
The employee who feels empowered to de-escalate a conflict or spot a vulnerability at work carries that confidence and civic awareness back out onto the high street and into their communities. That is where the ripple begins.
Risk management with a difference
Risk management with a difference
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