Book Review: The Safety Trap
The Safety Trap. By Spencer Coursen. St. Martin’s Press; 368 pages; $28.99
This book is useful to any security professional, but it would be especially beneficial to the general audience outside the profession looking to understand and improve overall security and safety.
The main purpose of The Safety Trap is to help the reader understand the fundamentals required to increase their safety and the safety of their loved ones by actively participating in security activities. The author nicely breaks down many of the elements that contribute to increased situational awareness, preparedness, and safety. Additionally, the author provides a solid, basic-level explanation and examples of the threat assessment and management discipline and its benefits.
The book includes a great introduction that speaks to current societal conditions, including unrealistic public safety expectations, lack of personal responsibility, apathy, social media, anxiety, mass violence, and others. It also provides excellent strategies, questions, case studies, explanations, and checklists for a plethora of key concepts that will help the reader understand and identify why they are in a vulnerable position, how to prepare and proactively mitigate risk, and how to improve their overall safety posture.
This book is a must-have for security consultants. The section on the essentials of threat management and the book’s case studies are excellent resources.
Reviewer: Carlos Goveo, CPP, is also a member of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals (ATAP), and he is a certified threat manager (CTM) and certified information systems security professional, (CISSP). Goveo is a retired U.S. Army aviation officer and has worked at several U.S. embassies around the world, auditing security programs and serving in safety, physical security, personal security, travel security, and anti-terrorism roles. He is a member of the ASIS Executive Protection Community.
