I recently read “Adventures In Casino Security”, which is an eye opening and humorous account of work life as a casino security employee. This book confirms one of the biggest problems in casino operations that Alan Zajic addresses in his article, “Security and Surveillance Cooperation”.
After reading about the Bellagio heist incident, the first question that arises was how did surveillance and security cooperate and collaborate before the incident? Last year we did our first installation and training of our Cheeteye security module for a large casino that has been experiencing security problems. The module promotes better collaboration and cooperation between security and surveillance. However, the hardest part of the project was convincing surveillance that this was a good idea and that security need dataveillance systems as well.
Maybe the “cooperation” between Bellagio surveillance and security needs to be investigated and tested as we are finding that when casino surveillance and security cooperate, the following happens in the security department:
- morale increases
- innovation is stimulated
From our experience, for the above to happen the following needed to take place:
- Executive leaders had to communicate a clear expectation that cooperation and collaboration is expected
- Executives had to model cooperation in their interaction with each other and the rest of the organization
- Cooperation must be rewarded and recognized
- Security must be given a budget to implement a collaboration system which communicated support and value by executive leadership
“Everything in the world we want to do or get done, we must do with and through people” – Earl Nightingale
