A lone female security guard on duty at a private security firm holding a cache of arms and ammunition. The security guard fell for the easy approach of a man who turned out to have been posing as a police officer.

The result of these two significant errors is that 15 weapons ended up in the hands of criminals. The extent of these serious miscalculations is enormous, the threat to public safety and security having been so casually increased.

What are the procedures in effect at such a firm that would allow security to remain in the hands of a single officer, male or female, given the property to be safeguarded, is one of the many questions which the company must answer for itself, while it seeks to probe its own processes in light of this heist.

In addition, the level of training and the experience of this officer on duty are now called into question. Why would someone working in that kind of highly sensitive atmosphere so casually allow herself to be outsmarted by a criminal posing as a police officer, is one more question even the most naive observer may well ask.

So trusting was this guard of the man in uniform that she threw all caution to the wind. She could not bother to ask even elementary questions, to request proper identification of someone she did not know.

What this incident speaks loudly to, as well, are the very methods of recruitment and engagement being used by such firms which offer themselves as protectors of life and property to an increasingly frightened citizenry.

All too often such firms are merely seizing on the fears of a population in the face of a crime wave long out of control. The incident exposes the vulnerabilities in the operations of many of these private security companies with questionable industrial relations and human resources management practices.

What it does also is to force the issue of the Government’s attempts to address these critical weaknesses back into the open. The Estate Police Association has been clamouring for this for the better part of the last decade.

Quite apart from the inexplicable dereliction of duty by the guard in question, the arrangement by which so many loaded weapons could have been so easily accessible, in a drawer just under the counter in the firm’s front office, is nothing short of a serious indictment against the management.

Acting Police Commissioner James Philbert must know that he is being called upon to stop at nothing in what has to be a relentless effort to recover these weapons. The firm in question must then demonstrate its worthiness to remain in business, with a radical overhaul of its systems, operations and procedures.