Orlando has long been known as one of America’s greatest tourist meccas, attracting tens of millions of visitors every year who come to enjoy the warm Florida climate and relax at one of the city’s world famous theme parks or resorts. Behind the scenes, there is an expansive network of private security executives who work hand-in-hand with public safety officials to ensure that visitors to the city remain safe during their trips.
This month, Orlando will play host to the ASIS International’s 62nd Annual Seminar and Exhibits, giving security practitioners from around with an opportunity to take in of the city’s many attractions during the four-day event. SecurityInfoWatch.com (SIW) had an opportunity earlier this year to tour some of Orlando’s most iconic landmarks with other members of the media to get a firsthand look at what they’re doing to keep their facilities secure.
The Mall at Millenia
One of the first stops on our tour was the Mall at Millenia, which ranks as one of the top 10 malls in the world in terms of sales. The mall features 1.2 million square feet of retail space and welcomes several million shoppers through its doors each year. The Mall at Millenia also features a unique mix of luxury brands – Rolex, Prada, Louis Vuitton, etc. – along with department stores and boutiques most people would associate with the average mall, such as Macy’s and Banana Republic.
Greg Moore, the mall’s security directors, says they place a greater emphasis on security than nearly any other mall and it is that dedication to creating a safe atmosphere for their tenants and visitors is what he feels sets them apart in the industry. One of the ways they do this is by keeping security ever-present throughout their property in the way of both technology and people.
“We want to send a subliminal message to any bad guy if they come onto this property that we’re serious about it – that there are easier places to go and do what they want to do,” Moore says. “I started [in security] in 1975 and back then security was observe and report… that was fine back then, you observed something, you reported it, you got it handled and follow up on it, whatever. In this day and age we have to go one step further. I’ve always said the difference between security people and public law enforcement is that security people are typically proactive while public law enforcement is reactive. They really can’t do much until a law has been broken, somebody has filed a complaint or there is some kind of initiating action that them to act.”
Moore says he views his business as pushing bad actors away rather than racking up numbers of people they’ve caught committing crimes on mall property.
“We do catch people but that’s not what our emphasis is on, our emphasis is on not allowing it to happen,” Moore explains. “That’s what’s good for this property, that’s what’s good for business, that’s what’s good for our tenants, and that’s how we protect our guests.”
According to Moore, everything they do – having top notch landscaping, housekeeping, maintenance, engineering, and security – is all a part of their crime prevention strategy.
“I’m not saying a bad guy walks in and starts check-marking, ‘Oh, the bathrooms are clean and boy there’s no trash.’ This all right here subliminally and it is a message that if you do something here we care enough and we’re going to catch you, so take your business elsewhere,” added Moore. “The broken window theory says that a deteriorated neighborhood starts with one broken window that somebody doesn’t fix. Beneath that broken window someone writes graffiti and no one washes it away and then street light burns out and nobody changes it. When you wake up five years later, your whole neighborhood looks like that. We take that broken window theory to heart here.”
Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts
Opened in 2014, the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts encompasses two city blocks in downtown Orlando and features the 2,700-seat Walt Disney Theater and 300-seat Alexis & Jim Pugh Theater. The Dr. Phillips Center is also in the process of building a 1,700-seat acoustical theater. In less than two years since opening its doors to the public, the facility has already seen more than 300 performances and has hosted some of the biggest names in arts and entertainment.
The job of securing the Dr. Phillips Center falls to Director of Security Chris Savard, who came on-board last year shortly after a 25-year career in law enforcement. One of the biggest challenges for Savard has been in changing the mindset of the performing arts community towards security. Having joined the center shortly after the Paris terror attacks, Savard knew that they needed to implement a bag check policy and to also have a sworn law enforcement officer in the building during performances.
“We went through some struggles in regards to implementing bag checks at first and then, actually, we started talking about doing back checks throughout the entire buildings for employees and everything just based on the current culture of the world, so we started doing that back of house also,” Savard says.
Since the bag check policy went into effect, Savard says they have kept a wide range of weapons and other prohibited items, such as guns and pepper spray, from entering the facility.
“There’s a culture in the performing arts that everything’s ok, everything’s fine but unfortunately in the real world we know there are bad people out there who to do bad things to soft targets. The whole idea is to still keep that, as I say ‘hakuna matata’ [outlook], the world’s great but let’s be a little more vigilant in regards to protecting the soft target.”
Another challenge for Savard and his security team is keeping people from bringing firearms into the center on their person in a state where a large number of people have concealed carry permits.
“A lot of people say, ‘Well, who is going to protect me if it’s a Paris incident? What if a terrorist comes in here and starts shooting up the place?’ My response to that, because I actually field some of the calls from irate customers, and I say hopefully the law enforcement officers that I’m paying to work at the facility that night will be able to take care of what’s going on,” said Savard. “That’s one of the biggest things right now is everybody wants to carry a weapon into the facility.”
Florida Hospital
With a network of eight different campuses consisting of more than 2,700 beds, Florida Hospital treats more patients each year than any other hospital in the state. The hospital also employs over 20,000 people and has more than 2,000 staff physicians. Having such a large footprint requires the hospital to have a robust security program that leverages both technology and personnel to adequately safeguard their facilities.
William Marcisz, senior director of security at Florida Hospital, oversees the massive healthcare provider’s security department. According to Marcisz, the hospital has nearly 2,500 surveillance cameras in use at all times and also has about 1,000 card access points throughout. All of the hospital’s security staff are certified through the International Association for Healthcare Security and Safety, the largest such hospital to do so.
When he first took over as security director three years ago, Marcisz said their security program was more campus-centric but he undertook an initiative to redesign it to have one security department not just for the main Florida Hospital campus in Orlando, but all of the different healthcare facilities that make up the entire Florida Hospital network in the Greater Orlando area. The department has now been organized into five different areas: operations, communications, technology, investigations, and training.
“We designed it similar to a corporate security program but it’s scalable,” Marcisz says. “In an organization this size, it’s important to be synchronized to the nth degree – making sure everybody uses the same forms, the same call signs and coding.”
This new corporate security model is already paying huge dividends for the healthcare provider.
“Where we get a lot of our return on investment is investigations,” Marcisz says. “We investigate just about everything here that is criminal in nature and we leverage our technology in our investigation. The way we look at investigations is that we invest ‘X’ amount of dollars into our investigations program and what we get back is hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets. We also look at it from a risk mitigation and deferring litigation [perspective].”
In one case alone, Marcisz says the security program was able to save the hospital $15 million as a result of an investigation carried out by their in-house staff.
