FMCC President’s BLOG – June 2019 by David Reynolds

Sunday, June 9th, 2019

Welcome to our third newsletter. In May and April, I wrote extensively about FMCC as an organization to help frame your view of what we are about in order to gain benefits and advantages for our members, IFMA, and FM at large. I also put forward opportunities to participate in FMCC. The April and May blogs offer a good deal for your interest a click away if you wish to look back. This month’s blog will be brief, focusing on our feature, already in the works before another workplace massacre by firearms took place in the offices of the city engineers on May 31 in Virginia Beach, in the U.S., leaving 13 dead and casualties totaling about twice that number.

Firearms mayhem – where next? Possibly anywhere, as we have seen. FMs brief facility occupants to “run, hide, fight”, and to remain watchful. We rely on access controls, camera systems, lighting, security staff, HR, and 911. But is there more that we can/should do for best results? Is there a rational and comprehensive approach that yields we can afford? Ultimately, FM decisions are business decisions. We owe it to our stake holders – for consultants, our clients – to recommend, create, and manage optimally.

FMCC member Art Crow has several decades of experience in performing and managing military and civilian security. He perceives security as a human and enterprise essential, and as a business issue subject to research, analysis, risk studies, budgeting, and evolution as societies and circumstances changed. His span of consulting work and study reinforces him as a thinker and writer. His first book, Facility Security Principles for Non-Security Practitioners came out in 2018.

In the first of two FMCC articles, published this month, Art assesses and dissects the problems and the challenges posed by current instances and patterns of mayhem. He presents matter-of-fact numbers, data, classifications and risks because data and information matter to FMs who wish above all to keep occupants safe and must at the same time have a rational basis for consuming money, time, and resources. Rigorous background is what we need for our own confidence and of the COO and CFO, key stakeholders.

The second article of the series will take us to the practical and particular. A few days ago, corresponding with me about the second article, Art acknowledged uncomfortably that the Virginia Beach murders, which took place when article 2 was already largely complete, were an uncanny fit with what he wrote. Would that the Virginia Beach, and all the other incidents, never took place. But they did, and there will be more.

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FMCC BLOG, June 2019
David Reynolds
president-fmcc@fmcc-ifma.org
c: +1 504 481 2627