Regulating the Security Industry

Global Perspectives

Mahesh Nalla, Tim Prenzler

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781351010351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

It is widely acknowledged that the size of the security industry has increased in virtually every country around the world, often eclipsing conventional police forces in personnel numbers and expenditures. Security providers differ from law enforcement officers in many ways, yet the nature of their crime reduction activities brings them into frequent contact with citizens, drawing to the forefront issues of training, professionalism and accountability. Unlike police officers, whose training and licensing standards are well established, regulations for security providers are often minimalist or entirely absent.

This volume brings together research on regulatory regimes and strategies from around the globe, covering both the large private security sector and the expanding area of public sector 'non-police' protective security. It examines the nature and extent of licensing and monitoring, and the minimum standards imposed on the industry by governments across the world. The chapters in this book were originally published in the International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice.

The Growth of Privatized Policing: Some Cross-national Data and Comparisons

RONALD VAN STEDEN¹

RICK SARRE²

The policing services offered by private security companies have been embraced enthusiastically by public and private entities the world over. It is argued in this paper that the impact of the “privatization” trend is, however, underestimated and understudied. In order to understand the importance of the phenomenon, and to measure its impact, it is important for researchers to undertake international comparisons of both the reach of private security and the extent to which its industries shape and complement the policing task. In pursuit of that end, this paper is designed to provide a snapshot description of the coverage of private security industries worldwide (where current information is available), along with an analysis of their impact.

INTRODUCTION

Over the last two decades, a significant restructuring of policing, especially in North America and the European Union (EU), has led to private industries now occupying a major position in “police extended families” (Law Commission of Canada, 2002; Johnston, 2003; Crawford and Lister, 2004). Indeed, the commercial market for private policing generally and private security more specifically expands inexorably. As Clifford Shearing and colleagues signaled a quarter-century ago: “[p]rivate security has developed so rapidly and unobtrusively, that its presence represents nothing less than a quiet revolution in policing” (1980, p. 1). The trend continues. Those who were pioneers in developing and building private security industries are witnessing a lucrative return on their investments. One recent estimate suggests that world demand for private contractual security service will grow 7.7 per cent annually until at least 2008 (Freedonia, 2005).

All of this is not particularly surprising, given that the publicly funded agencies of order maintenance that evolved and grew during the nineteenth-century development of modern policing never really eradicated the private forms of policing that had preceded them (Johnston, 1992). The upshot of this resurgence is a modern mix of public and private options and roles. According to Lucia Zedner,

the publicly employed officers of state police have been generally regarded as synonymous with the criminal justice state. It now appears increasingly possible that this model of the police may come to be seen as an historical blip in a more enduring schema of policing as an array of activities undertaken by multiple private and public agencies, and individual and communal endeavours. In the longer term, that archetypical modern state venture—the criminal justice system—may itself be regarded as historical anomaly (2006, p. 81).

Uniformed security guards are, by far, the most observable exponents of private security occupations. Their presence has considerably intensified alongside the police and police-like bodies (e.g. city wardens) safeguarding urban areas (Crawford et al., 2005). It is especially in mass private-property environments such as shopping malls, airport terminals, holiday resorts, industrial complexes and office parks that private guarding is on the rise (Sarre, 2005). Private personnel have thus become an integral part of overall policing strategies, or, as some would prefer to say, “governance of security” (Johnston and Shearing, 2003, p. 9).

In order to facilitate these developments, private security industries are now actively promoting an image of a sector that is able to distance itself from an unsavory reputation (O’Connor et al., 2004). Moreover, they are now offering a kaleidoscope of professional services and a greater variety of products than ever before, including manned guarding (both “in-house” and “contract”), alarm monitoring, security equipment production and installation, transportation of cash, investigation of white-collar crime and provision of advice on risk management (George and Button, 2000; Button, 2002).

Given the “silent rise” of private security, it is remarkable that the body of knowledge on the extent and powers of private security, although steadily evolving, is still rather limited. There is, to date, very little knowledge about the size and nature of the security industry worldwide. Clifford Shearing observes that

[w]hile private security is certainly no longer a subject that languishes on a forgotten scholarly back burner, it remains surprisingly under researched. Despite its obvious importance to the governance of security, scholars continue to focus far more attention on the police than they do the various other agents and agencies that provide for security (Shearing, 2003, p. xvii).

Researchers, but also politicians and policy-makers, often take the presence of private players simply for granted as “minor” players in the policing landscape. Their prominence is, however, overlooked at one’s peril. It is essential that researchers devote greater attention to the blossoming of private security companies in order to determine what they can and cannot offer society in terms of upholding social order.

In order to pursue that goal, this article will address five main issues. First, we underline that the mushrooming of commercial guarding agencies poses a challenge to the sovereignty of nation states. Policing is scattered away from ‘blue colored’ forces, thus challenging the traditional centralized methods of regulating society. Second, attention is paid to the barriers encountered when one attempts to measure the size of private security industries around the globe, although some useful, albeit cautious, estimates can still be made. Third, a modest international comparison of private security companies and firms is presented. Fourth, after describing trends in private security, we use an analytical lens through which to identify and explain why private security will continue to dominate the policing “market” into the foreseeable future, and finally, the article concludes with a research agenda, which stresses the need for good data and well-informed debate.

Why Private Security is a Challenge for Societies

The provision of policing is rapidly being redesigned across the globe. Its private forms disperse in a number of ways. “Commercialized” or “paid” security is the most pervasive and challenging one. David Bayley and Clifford Shearing state that the augmentation of specialized security companies, along with other non-state bodies and agents, into the field of policing implies

a watershed in the evolutions of their systems of crime control and law enforcement. Future generations will look back on our era as a time when one system of policing ended and another took its place (1996, p. 588).

Their premise assumes that the “governance of security” is no longer, if it ever was, the sole monopoly of the constitutional state. Today the growth of “mass private property” such as shopping malls and airport terminals, in company with a growing complexity and social heterogeneity within urban societies, erodes the “steering” role of governments and their police forces. Policing is being restructured along the lines of markets, residential communities and cultural communities, a tendency which overthrows the “Hobbesian-Weberian framework where the public sphere is the sphere of the governors and the private sphere is the sphere of the governed” (Shearing, 2006, p. 31). Crime control has, in other words, become everybody’s business. Nowadays, security guards, community volunteers and other private policing providers regularly patrol the vast majority of spaces where people spend their daily lives.

Trevor Jones and Tim Newburn (2002, 2006) have warned that one must not generalize too widely in making these observations lest one lose sight of the different historical paths that “local political cultures” follow (2006, p. 9.). But despite disagreements about how to interpret what is evolving, scholars widely recognize the process of “pluralization” (more specifically, “privatization”) of policing and the unique challenge this phenomenon poses to modern order maintenance.

Determinin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Growth of Privatized Policing: Some Cross-national Data and Comparisons
• 2. The Proliferation of Private Security Agencies in South Africa and its Concomitant Effect on Crime Prevention and Crime Reduction
• 3. The private security complex and its regulation in Africa: select examples from the continent
• 4. Reforming security industry training standards: an Australian case study
• 5. The Taming of the Japanese Private Security Industry
• 6. The evolution of security industry regulation in the European Union
• 7. Critiquing the regulation of private security in the United Kingdom: views from inside the sector
• 8. Common past – different paths: Exploring state regulation of private security industry in Eastern Europe and post-Soviet republics
• 9. Private security services regulations in the United States today
• Index