Hello, and welcome to what I hope will become a healthy conversation about what security means for the communities we live and work in.

I’m writing this from my desk after twenty plus years in public sector security roles, and I’ve seen how security issues intertwine with a lot of the issues we are facing in the poly-crisis/met-crisis. Sometimes the security piece is at the root of the challenge, sometimes it is the symptom of something else.

Why This Blog Exists

For too long, conversations about security have been dominated by an almost passive producer/consumer dynamic, wherein security is “produced” and the communities it is meant to support “consume” the product.

To be clear, this is not about de-establishing police or pretending that bad things do not require security measures. Rather this is an invitation to shift the security discussion to focus on how security programs can enable and empower the communities they serve, to interact in partnership vs supplier/consumer, and to see security as a facet of the poly-crisis which involves understanding that security solutions need to work with the solutions for other aspects as well.

I’ve learned that the most effective security isn’t imposed from the outside; it grows from within communities when people feel genuinely empowered to shape their own safety landscape.

This blog exists because I believe we need a fundamental shift in how we think about and practice security. Instead of asking “How do we protect these people?” we should be asking “How do we work with these people to build the security they want and need to thrive?”

What We’ll Explore Together

In the posts ahead, we’ll dive into questions like: • How do we move from briefing communities about security measures to actually co-designing them? • What does it look like to treat community members as security partners rather than passive beneficiaries? • How can we acknowledge and work with the expertise that community members already have about their own security needs? • How do we navigate the tensions between institutional requirements and community autonomy?