Guards behaving badly

[CorpSec]

One Sunday afternoon a long time ago, I drove up to a construction site - a 5 mile long road and bridge project - to check on the guard. I drove to the construction office and found the security pick-up truck parked outside, but no guard. I checked around the trailer for the guard without success. The guard's POV was there, so he had to be around someplace.
I jumped into the pickup, and started to look for my missing guard. About a mile away from the office, I saw a 50,000 pound Caterpillar scraper coming my way. I pulled to the side to let him pass. As the giant machine roared by, I noticed that the man sitting in the driver's seat, grinning ear-to-ear, was my guard!

I followed the scraper back to the equipment lot, where the guard climbed out of the scraper, still grinning like a fool. "Hi LT!" he said, dusting off his uniform. I asked the guard to explain himself, and he told me that he liked taking the big machines on rounds because they're more fun! "Don't worry, he said, I didn't drop the cutting blades, and I'm qualified to drive that scraper and any other piece of equipment here!" (he was a heavy equipment operator in the Army)

I told him that the client wouldn't appreciate him making Detex rounds with the heavy equipment, which is why they provided us with a pickup! I made him promise to stay off the equipment and told him if he did as I said I would forget what I saw. The guard agreed to stay off anything larger than the Ford F-150. That fall I saw him back in the scraper, but this time as an employee of the client!

Good story, and exactly how I would have handled it in light of the guy actually being qualified to drive the thing. I have seen how officers at my company have operated a golf cart. I would shudder if I saw one of them climbing onto a piece of heavy equipment.

[shadow4one]

We have touched on this before, but it has been awhile. Time to dust off the stories of clowns that you have worked with and their bad behavior on the job. I will start out with 3 old chestnuts from my contract security days.

1. One of the patrol officers raced through his patrols in a record one hour and forty five minutes. This allowed him to drive to a drive in movie theater near the Wisconsin border and catch a triple feature in full uniform and in the fully marked security vehicle.

2. One of the base station operators was passed out drunk on the floor of the dispatch center while alarms were streaming in on the computer alerting that one of the monitored properties was being broken into. Tens of thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment was stolen.

3. One guard lived across the street from his post. He would walk over in the morning and get the pass along information and gear from the night shift guard. This was at 0700. By 0710 he was back home in bed. If dispatch called for something during the day, he would walk over and take care of it...assuming the radio woke him up.

These are just the tip of the iceberg from what I saw in my esteemed 6 year career in contract security.

About a year ago 2 co worker's on the night shift brought paintball guns and were caught running around shooting each other and vehicles when they should have been on patorl but all they got was a slap on the hand and their guns taken away. If I had been their superviser Iwould have fired them becaucse this wasn't the first time they got caught doing something stupid.

[GuardGuy]

Why is it that all of these horror stories seem to come from contract security?

Not typing all that again, but Click here to read the Sage of "The Cigar" lol.

He worked for your company too?

Apparently their had been a bank robbery. No one was hurt, but when the local police and the FBI showed up, the assigned Guard wouldn't back off, to the point that he was interupting the agent who was trying to interview witnesses and employees.

There was a drug raid on a coke dealer at a property I worked. The local police complained to the security company that while they were searching and going in and out of the apartment, the guard stationed himself at the door and demanded ID from the drug cops before allowing them re-entry to the apartment.

Same guy picked up a few charges in an officer impersonation incident 3 days later. Turns out he had a lengthy criminal record too. That's a great story on it's own, I'll share if anyone's interested.

He actually did okay at the unarmed post - a fruit terminal - until they found out he was collecting and pocketing a $10 "entry fee" from the lumpers who unloaded the trucks. The lumpers gladly paid, because the guard would let a select few thought the gate and turned others away, creating more work for the lumpers who paid the fee. He made an extra $50-$100 a night that way.

Sounds like TheEnforcer.

[SecTrainer]

Most of these horror stories are as much about management behaving badly as they are about the rotten officers themselves.

Consider the "Saga of Cigar": You have a highly-experienced officer like BlackCaesar telling you - more than once - that you've hired a bad apple, informing you about the utterly unprofessional conduct that he's witnessed (which is confirmed by your clients), and all you do is move the guy around from one site/account to another?? WTF!?

This is as if you were running a hospital and a doctor told you that you have a nurse who has tuberculosis, so what do you do? Why, of course you move her around from one ward to another so she can spread her disease all over the place and increase your risk of something really bad happening by a factor of a thousand or so.

I just don't get it.

[Badge714]

Why is it that all of these horror stories seem to come from contract security?

Here's a couple in-house stories for you:

1. In 1987, I worked in-house at a large office building in St. Paul, MN. At that company, security had keys to the kitchen coolers, and had permission to eat food left on a particular shelf in the walk-in cooler. Everything else was off limits. Well, one Sunday our Assistant Security Supervisor, (or A.S.S. as I liked to call him) walked into the cooler looking for a snack. He noticed cases of steaks on the floor of the cooler, and figured they wouldn't miss a couple. When three executives showed up to pick up the steaks for the administration department's picnic, they found the A.S.S. in the kitchen grilling up twp steaks and a mess of fried potatoes! He didn't get fired, or even reprimanded. But we lost our key to the coolers.

2. The same A.S.S., was working the midnight shift, and had to pee. Security wasn't allowed to leave the Skyway desk because there was an alarm board that had to manned at all times. He could be relieved by the building engineer, but he was at a building across town. Since the Skyway was locked, he could have done what the rest of us did - put the base radio mic by the alarm board, lock the transmit key down, and take an HT to the restroom. But, he decided to pee in the lobby planters. While he was relieving himself, a company attorney (female, of course) who was working late came out of a stairwell door and caught the A.S.S. watering the ferns. The company that maintained the plants knew that someone was peeing in the plants, but just switched them out thinking that homeless people were watering them. The A.S.S. didn't get fired on the condition that he reimbursed the plant company $300 for the plants he killed.

Those are just two of many stories about this guy. He still works for that company as the Director of Security. Every few years I call the guard desk there and ask if they're hiring security guards. I tell them that I worked there back in the day and ask if the A.S.S. still works there. They'll tell me that he does, and has been the Director for a long time. I say "Really? Wow, I didn't think they'd ever make HIM Director of anything! Hey, did you ever hear about the time he....?" Some stories are just too good to let them just fade away!

[5423]

Why is it that all of these horror stories seem to come from contract security?...

Answer: What's the First Rule of Fight Club?

Once again, I have to agree with Trainer: ALL of these horror stories reflect poor management. It's the responsibility of management to act decisively for the overall good of the company and for their employee pool. If that means that one bad apple needs to be culled, then make it so.

At one point, the FTO assigned to train me at a new job had a habit of losing his temper over anything and everything, usually culminating with his charging and screaming death-threats at whoever happened to be his target-of-the-moment. On eventually receiving a promotion to supervisor, my first act was to escort him off the property; repeated complaints to the department manager (from everyone he'd ever worked with) hadn't gotten the job done, so...

[CorpSec]

Here is an in-house story. We had these Detex wands that read these barcode stickers throughout the building. One guard carefully peeled each sticker off and placed them in order on a sheet of paper.

He then made a copy of all the barcodes. From that point on he would do all of his Detex "rounds" from the desk. He would just go down the sheet scanning a barcode every minute or so like he was actually walking through the building.

[Black Caesar]

Most of these horror stories are as much about management behaving badly as they are about the rotten officers themselves.

That's even more true than you know in this case.

A couple months ago I took one of my mandatory courses at Dallas PDs academy and my old buddy (the guy who was my area manager who now works for the local school district PD) was there. On our break we got to talking about old times including cigar, and he let me know some stuff I didn't know.

He'd been made area manager after the previous 2 had been fired for poor performance, he was our 3rd area manager in last than a year. His successors had fired guys that got into serious trouble or did stupid things, as a result the company had staffing problems that actually led to contracts being lost (not totally the area manager's fault, but you know what they say about stuff rolling down hill....)

My friend told me that his bosses told him in no uncertain terms to keep enough (and they used this word) BODIES to maintain minimum staffing, no matter what or else. They basically told him to shift people around rather than firing them. He said that they didn't care about "potential problems" (like law suits), the bottom line was all that mattered.

Well, he did that, over and over again for the 4 months he was area manager, but he findly had enough and quit about a month after I left, despite having 2 kids and a 3rd on the way, what they were asking him to do was wrong and stupid.

But the chickens came home to roost for them eventually, the company is now defunct in part thanks to a series of law suits from ex-employees and ex clients. My buddy actually said that the company's former CEO fled the country lol.

[SecureTN]

Here is an in-house story. We had these Detex wands that read these barcode stickers throughout the building. One guard carefully peeled each sticker off and placed them in order on a sheet of paper.

He then made a copy of all the barcodes. From that point on he would do all of his Detex "rounds" from the desk. He would just go down the sheet scanning a barcode every minute or so like he was actually walking through the building.

Got to admit, that took a little creativity.

Worked with a guy who got fired for smoking weed in the office

[Jaeger]

I am yet to see anything too radical concerning the subject personally, although I've heard my fair share of stories concerning colleagues and former employees naturally.

There's these older guys working one of the sites that I regularly do shifts in as well, and sometimes I've seen these old timers just sleeping and snoaring very loudly in the monitoring room, which is a fairly coarse mistake, I'd say.

One of these old timers was posted here a few months back and during the shift the officer is required to keep one PMR-phone on at all times so that the personnel of our client can communicate and request the assistance of the security guard in case something comes up.

Someone from the site needed a key, which was located in the monitoring room where this security guard was wide asleep and didn't even have the PMR-phone on. Everybody tried to wake the guy up by loudly knocking on the door and eventually even banging on the door very aggressively, but this fellow just kept dreaming.

Eventually he woke up, and everyone was very angry. They asked the officer why didn't he have the phone on, to which he calmly replied "oh, everything was so quiet that I decided to keep it off".

That was a was very childish mistake from a guy who had been on the job for at least 20 years and on top of that he was a site supervisor of another location. This sort of stuff made me question our choice of supervisors once again, but what you can do? It is a given that this is a very quiet site, but that phone is supposed to be turned on at all times so that if something comes up you can call for assistance from security.

I decided not to report this, since I had only heard of the incident via second-hand information. This does prove though, that older guys who have done this for a long time tend to get sloppy once they are transferred to a "quiet account".