From the Porch Swing: The Socialization of Security

My wife and I had lucked out. After eight days of steady rain, New York City weather was clearing up just as we crossed from Delaware into New Jersey on the Acela Express train from Washington , DC . We were headed toward Penn Station in the heart of Manhattan. I always chuckle when I hear the name Manhattan —a name derived from a Native American word meaning island of hills. Today, you would certainly not cite hills as the dominant feature of this most cosmopolitan world of skyscrapers and towering manmade landmarks. In fact, the only hill I could recall from my last visit was the rise of Morningside Heights as you leave Central Park headed uptown into Harlem.

When our train pulled into Penn Station, we grabbed our luggage and joined the lurching mass of humanity headed up the escalator. Sunday afternoon finds New York given over to worshippers, tourists and sightseers, so we had no difficulty finding a taxi to take us to our hotel in Midtown.

The next day, we awoke with a plan to see the sights and rediscover a city where we love to play the tourist. We generously tipped the doorman, who discreetly directed us to a tiny diner at 52nd and Lexington Avenue . For eight bucks we had a great Italian omelet, home fries, toast and coffee. A room service bagel at the hotel (coffee not included) would have cost us $25. We then walked back the three blocks to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where the Gray Line loads their ubiquitous double-decker tour buses. For $49, you can tour the entire city, from Harlem to Wall Street and even Brooklyn , for two days, and you can hop off at any stop that strikes your fancy.

As we looked around the city from our vantage point atop the roofless upper deck of the bus, we were buffeted by the winds that swept briskly through the manmade canyons of steel, limestone and glass. Although you have to duck each time you come to a traffic signal or overhanging street-side tree branch, this moving view is one of the best in the city. And as with all my forays to busy locales, I enjoyed keeping an eye on the security-relevant features around me.

The last two decades have seen major security changes in New York City, even outside of the obvious impacts of the 9/11 terrorism attacks. I remember my first eye-opening visit to Times Square as a young man on one of his first business trips. The area was awash in dodgy strip clubs, seedy shot-and-a-beer joints, and garish storefronts making lurid appeals to perverts and fetishists of every stripe. The pavement was punctuated every few yards by dirty and aggressive beggars with substance abuse or mental health issues. Aging hookers offered a variety of services and diversions. It was a scary and oppressive experience for a young man. This most recent trip, however, witnessed a very different Times Square and provided an exciting opportunity to look at the architecture and recall the history of this great city.

Most of the Midtown area is now the haunt of businesspeople, tourists and theater-goers. You can still encounter an address-less street person or wobbly drunk, but for the most part, the people on the sidewalk are very pleasant, if seemingly in a race for their lives. Waiters, shop owners and barkeeps are unfailingly polite and helpful. This personable attitude is also reflected in the physical structures around you. Instead of iron-barred windows and graffiti-covered steel doors, you encounter well-lit and carefully decorated window displays and welcoming entrances to cheerful restaurants and bars.

The scene is not the same everywhere you go, however. The tour bus company makes it a point to take you to the more scenic city areas, but the observant eye recognizes the signs of the presence of less law-abiding citizens as you move around the island. We traveled through one area where gang graffiti festooned walls and the boarded-up windows of vacant brownstone townhouses. Doors to convenience stores and dry cleaners were barricaded behind steel grates, and glass windows were replaced with wood and masonry. Razor wire topped chain-link fences that screened alleyways from the street. Empty cups, plastic bags and discarded paper were strewn along the sidewalk, only to be shuffled down the street by the next gust of wind or passing bus.

Obviously the security issues are different in these neighborhoods. These signs are the visual clues we use to make assumptions about the personal risks we assume as visitors to an unfamiliar place. It's the socialization aspect of personal security.

Most of us simply note these observable attributes and automatically process them in our internal risk calculator. Everyone has one, although you may never have stopped to think about it. When our perceived risk reaches a level that makes us uncomfortable, we take steps we believe will reduce our personal risk. In this case, we may climb back on the bus to head to a more familiar and, presumably, a more secure location. We may also find ourselves being more suspicious of other pedestrians, and make it a point to avert our gaze from theirs. Everyone has a personal risk tolerance level, and yours is the result of your desires, environment and experiences.

The socialization of security is all around you. A simple wood picket fence with a latched gate is a basic physical barrier that makes a statement to you as a passerby: This is my area, and unless you are welcomed inside, please refrain from entering. A taller fence with a key-operated lock may mean the owner is not always nearby, and unless you have a key, you may not enter. If that fence is a tall steel fence topped with razor wire, the statement is somewhat different. It says that there are people about who will not honor the social injunction against breaching the fence, and more stringent means are required to discourage trespassing. That could be the case based on the loss experience of that locale, which in turn makes a statement about the criminal intent of some of the locals. It could also mean the protected area or its contents are valuable enough to invite a criminal breach.

In each of these scenarios, the composition and placement of the physical barrier gives the onlooker a set of clues about the social contract that exists between the property owner who erected the barrier and those whom he expects will come in contact with it. We see these clues every day, yet seldom do we stop to consider the social relationship that is described by the security safeguards in our environment. Security professionals, however, are forced to not only consider these relationships, but to help define them. And your “gut feel” about a situation, while important, is no longer enough.

In our ongoing war against terrorism, we are pitted against zealots, murderers, and a non-uniformed army of combatants who don't accept the traditional social contracts implied by most of our existing security safeguards. It is a war with a new set of rules, and the absence of many others. In this environment, we need to carefully document and evaluate all the potential threats and vulnerabilities to our citizens and their assets. It is no longer good enough to use old-fashioned best-guess methods or rely solely on hard-won experience. The new world of security is here, and the signs all point to a critical requirement to change the way we perceive and manage our risks.

John McCumber is a security and risk professional. He is the author of Assessing and Managing Security Risk in IT Systems: A Structured Methodology from Auerbach Publications. Mr. McCumber can be reached at [email protected].