The Public Reception Area

In most instances, anyone can walk into your office’s public reception room. Only if your offices are in a Federal building housing Federal judges or some other building that has unusual security measures will your visitors go through any kind of security screening before they get to your office.

The public reception area presents an interesting and frequently overlooked physical security challenge. Once visitors are in the reception area, they are inside your facility and probably within arm’s reach of at least one of your employees. The public, which can include someone intent on violence, is already inside at least one perimeter of physical security measures—and at your invitation! The challenge is to make the reception area informative and inviting to people who have no malicious intent while making it threatening, foreboding, and impenetrable to those with malicious intent.

Detailed guidance about the selection and training of reception room employees is beyond the scope of this Web site. Nevertheless, consider these points:

• The receptionist is a Forest Service employee. His or her life is no less worthy of protection than the lives of other Forest Service employees with less exposure to the public.
  
  
• The receptionist is usually the first point of contact with the public entering your office. The receptionist is in a position to assess visitors’ behaviors. The receptionist needs to be trained to spot unusual behaviors and respond appropriately. The receptionist must be mature, calm, level-headed, communicative, observant, experienced in dealing with a wide range of human behaviors, and knowledgeable about the Forest Service, its employees, and the functions at that facility.
  
  
• The receptionist should not be expected to physically intercept or impede a real or perceived attacker. In a potentially dangerous situation, the receptionist’s instruction should be: “Flee, don’t fight.”

Here are some guidelines for designing public reception rooms that protect the receptionist, innocent bystanders, and other Forest Service employees.

• The room should be as small as possible consistent with the volume of public traffic. Smaller areas are more easily observed both by the receptionist and by electronic surveillance. The receptionist should be able to see the entire public area. There should be no hiding places for people or things.
  
  
• The receptionist’s duty should be to observe and interact appropriately with the public. Someone studying your facility while posing as a member of “the public” should feel that he or she is always being observed by the receptionist. Don’t load the receptionist with duties that distract him or her from observing the reception room and its approaches.
  
  
• In high-security settings, do not furnish the reception room with comfortable chairs and benches. Some furnishings may serve as hiding places for dangerous items. Do not encourage the public to lounge and read. In high-security settings, the room’s design and furnishings should encourage visitors to conduct their business quickly and leave.
  
  
• Furnishings and wall hangings need to be anchored so they cannot be picked up and thrown or used as weapons. Nothing in the public area should be loose if it could be used as a weapon or an entry tool.
  
  
• No mail or other deliveries should be received at the reception room. Post a sign on the outside of the reception room door directing delivery persons to the offsite mail and parcel reception facility, if one exists. If anyone enters the reception room carrying a parcel, a package, or any other item that looks out of place, the receptionist should discretely signal for an immediate equally discrete security response to the reception room.
  
  
• Enable the receptionist to observe visitors before they enter the reception room. Enable the receptionist to electrically lock out suspicious persons before they enter. The lock should prevent the door from being opened from the outside, but it should not prevent the door from being opened from the inside. The intent is not to confine someone in the reception room, but to keep a suspicious person out. Activating the electrical lock should automatically generate a discrete alarm that results in an appropriate security response.
  
  
• The public reception room should never be used as an employee entrance. The only door connecting the reception room to interior facility space should be easily and immediately accessible to the receptionist, but be completely inaccessible to the public, or accessible only with great difficulty.

The principal functions of the door connecting the public reception area and the interior office space are to provide a quick escape route for the receptionist and to serve as a substantial barrier, protecting interior office space from access by unwanted intruders.

Never adopt a floor plan that puts the public between the receptionist and the escape route. The receptionist should be able to leave the reception room in less than 3 seconds. An attacker in the public reception room should not be able to reach the door in fewer than 6 seconds. An escaping receptionist needs to be able to get to the door, open it, pass through the door, and secure it before an intruder can reach it.

• If local circumstances warrant, completely isolate and armor the public reception room. Put the receptionist behind bullet-resistant glass and armored walls. Armor the public reception room’s walls so that bullets cannot penetrate any walls, doors, windows, or the true ceiling. Armor materials can be reasonably discrete.
  
  
• Give the receptionist a discrete way to summon help. An alarm (known as a duress alarm) that does not alert the unwanted intruder is essential. The receptionist’s standing order must be to leave the area immediately after activating the duress alarm. Make sure that the receptionist knows that the duress alarm is to be used whenever the receptionist perceives danger.
  
  
• Install appropriately selected video surveillance cameras and lenses to provide complete coverage of the reception area. Some of the video surveillance cameras should be hidden from public view. Assuming that no one will be constantly monitoring the video images, position the reception area video monitors on the route security responders will take on the way to the reception room. Install an appropriate visual indicator on the monitors to attract the attention of employees if any alarm devices in the reception area are triggered. Security first responders should not rush into the reception area without using the video system to assess the area first.
  
  
• Never put the keypad that controls the intrusion detection (alarm) system in the public reception area or where the public can see it.