Your Security Program Runs on Whoever Is Working Tonight

In my last article I asked a simple question: who owns security in your operation? This one is about the other end of the org chart. It’s about the person who is actually standing there when something happens.

Most owners picture their security program as equipment and paperwork. The cameras, the alarm panel, the plan that went in with the license application. When I picture a security program, I picture whoever is closing tonight.

The camera will record the person who knocks on the back door at 9:50 p.m. It will not decide whether to open it. That decision belongs to a budtender, a shift lead, or a receptionist, and in most operations nobody has told them the decision is theirs.

The decisions nobody hands out

Spend one shift with front-line staff and count the security decisions. They come all day, and most of them don’t look like security:

• A delivery driver shows up early and asks to come in through the back.

• Someone follows an employee through a secured door, and the employee holds it, because holding the door is polite.

• The alarm panel shows a fault at close. The manager has already left. Nobody knows whether it matters.

• The schedule says two people close. Tonight there is one.

• A car has been sitting in the lot for forty minutes and the driver keeps watching the entrance. Is that worth a call? To whom?

Each one is small. Each one is also the moment where the plan either works or it doesn’t.

Why good employees make the wrong call

When one of these moments goes badly, the first instinct is to blame the employee. In most of the cases I’ve looked at, the employee wasn’t the root cause. The setup was. It usually looks like one of these:

Nobody told them the decision was theirs. Procedures describe what should happen. They rarely say who decides when the situation doesn’t match the procedure. So people wait, guess, or call a manager who isn’t picking up.

Customer service and security pull in opposite directions. We hire front-line staff to be welcoming, to say yes, and to avoid friction. Then we expect them to refuse a door, question a stranger, or stop a transaction. Without explicit permission to say no, most people fall back on the habit they were hired and praised for.

Training happened once. A policy read at orientation is not preparation. The person closing alone in January may have heard the robbery procedure one time, months ago, in a room full of other new hires.

Reporting doesn’t seem to go anywhere. If an employee flags something and never hears about it again, they learn that flagging is a waste of time. The next odd thing goes unreported.

The plan was written for the inspector. A security plan written to get a license approved can be accurate and still useless at the door. It describes systems. It doesn’t tell a new hire what to say to the person knocking.

None of these are character flaws. They are design problems, and design problems belong to whoever owns the program.

What I would put in place

You don’t need a thicker manual. You need a short, specific one that people actually use.

1. Name the moments. List the five to ten front-line situations that carry real risk in your operation: after-hours access, tailgating, cash handling, alarm faults, short-staffed closes, suspicious activity, an escalating customer. Write each one as a situation someone will recognize, not as a policy heading.

2. Hand out the authority in writing. For each moment, say who decides and what they can do without asking. A single sentence like “You may refuse entry to anyone after close, including people who say they’re vendors or employees, and you will not be in trouble for it” does more work than a page of procedure.

3. Rehearse the moment, not the policy. Ten minutes at a shift meeting, walking one scenario out loud, beats an hour of slides. Who does what, what you say, who you call, and what you write down afterward. Repeat it until it stops feeling like a quiz.

4. Make reporting easy and close the loop. One channel, a couple of minutes to use, and no penalty for a false alarm. When a report leads to a change, tell the person who made it. That’s how you get the next one.

5. Treat the shift handoff as a security step. Before the outgoing manager leaves, the closing lead should know what’s broken, what’s unusual, and who to call. A camera that’s down or a door that won’t latch is information the night shift needs before 10 p.m., not after.

I learned this long before I worked in security. I spent two years as a military fire and rescue instructor, and I’m a licensed fire department instructor today. Deployed downrange with RED HORSE at a forward operating base, I saw it play out for real. In an emergency, people fall back on instinct, and instinct is whatever they’ve been trained on. If you have nothing to fall back on, that’s when you fall.

A three-question check

Pick whoever is closing tonight and ask them, with no warning:

1. If someone knocks on the back door after close and says they’re from the alarm company, what do you do?

2. If the alarm panel shows a problem as you’re leaving, who do you call, and what happens if they don’t answer?

3. When was the last time you reported something, and what happened after you did?

If the answers are confident and match across your staff, your program has reached the front line. If you get a pause, three different answers from three people, or “I’d probably call my manager,” you’ve found your next training priority. Finding it cost you nothing.

Ownership at both ends

A security program needs a leader at the top who owns the risk picture and directs the vendors. It also needs people at the front who know which decisions are theirs and have been told, in plain words, that they’re allowed to make them. A leader without that front line gives you a good plan that nobody carries out on a bad night.

Much of what goes wrong in a security program goes wrong at a door, a register, or a closing checklist. That’s where the program has to work.

Training has always been where I put a large share of my company’s resources, and I believe in it across the board for every person on the team. That’s why VSG’s training academy, VAKA, built its SENTINEL 100 and 200 courses around the specific settings in the cannabis industry: dispensary, site, distribution, and transportation. A closer at a dispensary and a driver on a transport run face different moments, and each should train for their own.

If you run a regulated operation and you aren’t sure how your closing staff would answer those three questions, I’m glad to talk it through.