On the Practices of Private Security Officers: Canadian Security Officers' Reflections on Training and Legitimacy

Introduction: Private Security in the Twenty-First Century EVEN IN THE YEARS BEFORE SEPTEMBER 11, SECURITY PERSONNEL WERE EVERYWHERE. In the United States, for example, Benson (1998) estimated that there were two and one-half private security officers for every municipal police officer, a trend that Jones and Newburn (1999) noted is increasing in their study of the private security industries in the United States and the United Kingdom. Waard (1999) saw the same trend in several other European countries. Newburn (2001) tied this growth to an increase in privately owned environments and the privatization of what had traditionally been public space in Western societies. Williams and Johnstone (2000) further considered the growing presence of, and reliance on, closed-circuit television (CCTV) in Britain as evidence of the increasing intrusion of private security in public realms. In Canada, Sanders (2005) noted a 67% increase in employment in this sector between 1991 and 2001, again, before September 11. Social scientific research on private security is, despite these social trends, still scant compared to that on traditional policing. Research has attended to the need and prescriptions for private security in various locations (Benson, 1998; Ferguson, 1991), and, in the case of shopping mall security, the need to have officers with whom customers can comfortably interact (Vellani, 2000). However, the most popular area of social scientific research into private security has not concerned concrete practices of security officers or firms, but rather what might be termed the "(de)legitimating" aspects of private security. Especially problematized have been the challenges of the increased role in governance that private security firms and officers play in the modem public realm and attendant issues of "accountability" in private security (cf. Johnston and Shearing, 2003, Rigakos, 2002; Shearing, 1996; Shearing and Stenning, 1987; Wood and Shearing, 2007). With respect to empirical issues (as against the more theoretical concerns of Shearing and his coterie), perhaps the greatest critique of the "legitimacy" of private security officers has surrounded the paucity in many jurisdictions, especially North American ones, of formal training regimens for them, as against the extensive and well-known training requirements for public police officers. In their foundational and influential Hallcrest Report H on private security trends and recommendations, Cunningham et al. (1990:312) Reported that, despite improvements in the then-extant regimens for private security training in the United States, the average security officer only received four to six hours of instruction prior to their first assignments. Walsh (1994) echoed this need for extensive training four years later. By 2004, Fischer and Green (2004: 90) Reported that 25 U.S. states required a formal training curriculum for private security officers. This percentage, however, reflected an improvement for those militating for more, and more standardized, training; in 1978, no U.S. states required training (Fischer and Green, 2004: 40). The content of that training varied greatly with respect to the employment of the officer in retail, office, airport, personal-service, and other settings. However, even these figures may still occasion pessimism. As Button (2007a: 118) points out, the most regulated North American states and provinces do not require remotely as rigorous standards for training as do nearly all European countries. There are, then, notable complaints derived from research and theorizing on private security, all concerning its legitimacy with respect to legal accountability and formal training regimens, as well as concerning the fact that, if private security officers are new de facto police, they do not appear to be as professional or as legitimate as are the "real" police. What is missing in much of this critically oriented research is what these security officers, however under-trained and illegitimate they might be, are actually doing. …