I joined the U.S. Army after 9/11, when I was 20 years old. I then went through the 18X program, which took two years of training to complete, and became a Green Beret. During my eight and one-half years within the special operations community, I served four tours in Iraq, one to Africa, and one in the Republic of Georgia.
I have been in the security industry since January 2014 and have seen it all. I have seen guys crawl through a tiny ventilation shaft to get into a cultivation facility. One group of robbers put a ram on their truck to break through the doors on several cultivation sites. I have seen robbers break into the same site several times within a week because the cultivation site was what we call a “soft target.” The groups of people who are conducting these assaults are very well organized and plan their maneuvers. The best thing any dispensary or cultivator can do is adopt a multifaceted approach:
Two, increase your security profile by having a well-trained and armed guard at your location. Here at Iron Protection Group, we utilize training to put our operators “left of the bang.” That means our operators go through training that helps them perceive and identify a threat before it is a threat. People give off indicators whether they want to or not. These could be nonverbal cues they cannot hide. By applying what we call a “baseline,” identifying anomalies and accessing your file folders, you can identify those individuals or instances that could be a threat.
Three, have a well-trained operator who knows how to utilize weapons systems. We put our guards through a course very similar to the one I was put through as a Green Beret. To be sure, having a mentally and physically well-trained operator makes all the difference when it comes to security within the cannabis space.
– William Glenn Weatherly is Director of Operations at Iron Protection Group.
