Former Princess Deck Office explains Security On Princess Ships

[chasetf]

Found this interesting post on Princess security on the "Ask a Cruise Question" thread.

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=441522 (post #3)

I am a former Princess Cruises deck officer, so I'll try to answer your questions regarding the onboard security staff. Since I haven't worked for any of the other lines, they will have some differences that I am unaware of. The size of a ship's security detachment may range from 6-15 members and 2-3 officers depending on size, area of operation and general threat level.

 

The Security Officers for and Princess and P&O are all ex-military members (usually former MPs) or cops with a minimum of 10-15 years experience in law-enforcement. Generally, they seem to hire the ex-military folks (Navy or Royal Marines) because they also possess a lot of seafaring experence.

 

The Security Petty Officers for P&O/Princess Cruises are exclusively all former members of the Gurkha Regiment. Although they are all employed with the same rank, they generally organize themselves by their former service rank. Following the downsizing of the Gurkha units in the British Army, many former members are now employeed as bodyguards to the mega-rich and are widely used as security in the cruise line industry.

 

The security team does not have any lethal weapons onboard, but a quick search on wikipedia about the Gurhkas will tell you that this is not a problem. They, as agents of the Ship's Master do have powers of arrest and all cruise ships are equipped with a padded cell or as it was labelled on the Grand Princess a "Miscreant Cabin."

 

As for the perceived problems aboard the ships, I guess that my best answer is that you have an adult population onboard of a few thousand people from all walks of life, some of which are doing some heavy drinking. Only a very small percentage of them actually cause any problems, and most of them need to only be warned by the security staff for things to be resolved. Sometimes they do have to go further and then the trouble passenger is usually handed over to authorties at the next port of call. (Why anyone would ever want to risk going to a Turkish prison I'll never know.)

 

As you mentioned in your post like every small town, crimes do regrettably occur now and then. Most of these seem to occur in the crew areas. On one ship they caught a group of crewmembers breaking into crew cabins. Having said that, I've worked on other ships where I routinely had over $8000 sitting in my desk drawer and never had a penny go missing even though I had 8 different cabin stewards over the course of the contract.