Selling Security: The Private Policing of Public Space.

ol. 15 No.2 (February 2005), pp.145-149

SELLING SECURITY: THE PRIVATE POLICING OF PUBLIC SPACE, by Alison Wakefield. Devon, UK and Portland, Oregon: Willan Publishing, 2003. 252pp. Cloth ₤30.00 / $55.00. ISBN: 1-84392-049-2.

Reviewed by Fran Buntman, Department of Sociology, The George Washington University. fbuntman@gwu.edu.

In a recent faculty meeting, a colleague mentioned that a student had wanted to do his or her criminal justice internship at Macy’s. The implication was that such a placement was ludicrous: what would a student learn about criminal justice working in a retail department store? But if the student were to be working within the company’s internal private security division, perhaps the suggestion would not have been so outrageous after all.

As Alison Wakefield points out, private security is very much engaged in policing, or at least a form of policing. Exactly what that involvement entails depends on an array of criteria, and may result in cooperative or antagonistic relationships with official policing bodies. Primarily concentrating on Britain, Wakefield uses participant observation research of three privately owned but publicly accessible sites policed by private security to better understand the private security industry. More broadly, her book aims “to offer a conceptual framework for making sense of the role of private security in policing, and to explore the implications of that role with respect to social policy” (p.xx).

Although dry to read, I found Wakefield’s conceptual and theoretical section of her book informative and interesting. Her starting point is that much of social and economic life in contemporary (at least capitalist) societies takes place in “mass private property,” that is, privately-owned space that is nevertheless open to the public. These range from malls to movie-houses and airports to educational institutions, among many others. These sites are usually policed privately, so that security is defined by the property owners rather than by the state. Unlike government, which at least in theory is based on democratic accountability and societal imperatives, property owners have little answerability to the public at large, which necessarily changes the style and rationale of policing.

SELLING SECURITY begins by asserting the relevance of the concept and practice of policing to private security. Following a literature review, Wakefield identifies “governance of security” as core to understanding contemporary policing, which she further notes is complex in structure and diverse in goals, and in which private security should be included (p.16). Here and elsewhere, the author draws heavily on the work of Clifford Shearing (who wrote a preface to the book) and his various collaborators who have chartered much of the research in this area. She also employs Richard Ericson’s notion of the “security quilt” which refers to the diverse sources and functions of how contemporary security and policing is procured and organized, including both [*146] public and private agencies. While her focus is on the particular British make-up of the security quilt, and how this has and might be modified by new law and policy which encourage private policing, the broader points about the multiple forms of policing and the many groups which engage in policing are relevant to many different countries. One general point that emerges is that although state policing agencies may not always be enamored of private security, their working together is already a fact of life and is likely to expand in the future. Aspects of “community policing” provide examples of this trend.

The relevance of her focus on Britain becomes particularly important in her second chapter which examines “mass private property” in that country. She includes in this understanding property formally owned by the state that is in fact under autonomous and private control. The value and appropriateness of this categorization becomes especially clear when Wakefield classifies urban space by ownership (public and private) and openness to the public (open versus restricted), also captured in a very useful table (p.24). The categorization underscores that access is shaped as much by function as by ownership; shopping centers are private but (mostly) open, but airports are usually publicly owned but highly restricted.

For me, one of the most worrying aspects about mass private space is the legal right in most countries for owners to control and deny access to members of the public, the latter of whom would likely fall into some non-conformist or outlier category. Wakefield briefly reviews current UK and U.S. law in this regard, where the general pattern is to protect property owners rather than public access. She calls for the elaboration of standards that would give greater weight to balancing the rights of the “non-conforming visitor” (p.29) with the rights of the property owner and “obedient customer,” but gives us little reassurance that such legal balancing is likely to occur any time soon. My civil libertarian concerns were given further fuel in SELLING SECURITY’s chapter on the security industry. On behalf of its clients, the security industry often defines potential security threats very broadly: not only to criminal behaviors, but to wide definitions of being anti-social, from expressing opinions to being lost, to being even mildly non-conformist. Of course, unlike the state which is at least supposed to observe due process requirements, private owners and security providers have few such limits.

SELLING SECURITY focuses on one sector of the private security industry, namely staffing services, called “manned security.” The three spaces she studies are “The Art Plaza,” an arts and theater complex that includes other retail outlets; “The Quayside Centre,” which is a major shopping center; and “The City Mall.” This City Mall is the most complex site in that it functioned 24 hours a day, had fairly distinct functions by day (mostly shopping, including supermarket shopping) and evenings (night clubs and bars), and was close to an area with relatively high unemployment, a significant drug problem (including heroin), and inter-ethnic tensions. The City Mall also differed markedly from the other two case studies in that its security team was in-house, rather than an external company with a security contract. [*147]

One of the first things that became apparent is that security providers need to decide whether to emphasize their controlling functions and capacities, or whether to emphasize their potential to help and protect. In the Arts Plaza and the Quayside Centre, it was more conducive to the public’s sense of comfort and well-being that security presented a benign, helpful face. While serious threats could exist, such as street crime or terrorism, both these venues sought to portray their spaces as welcoming, easy-going, and safe. They avoided putting customers off by the presence of a too strong and militant security force.

In contrast, the actual and perceived security threats were greater for the City Mall, especially in terms of violent crime, public disorder, and property crime. Consequently, the security team emphasized a tougher face. A self-conscious emblem of this distinction was that the security officers in the two former sites wore unthreatening civilian-style uniforms, whereas the City Mall security officers wore uniforms modeled on police garb. (In a similar vein, architectural and design features sought to give out different messages to different potential and actual visitors to the three sites.)

In all three of the cases, the security companies (or unit, in the in-house case), and their security guards were apparently among the security providers with better reputations and higher degrees of professionalism within the private security industry. Nevertheless, for guards in the two contracted firms, wages were relatively low and turnover relatively high. Security workers in the in-house unit were better off, although there was almost no opportunity for promotion and little training was offered (p.162). Wakefield also notes expanding mechanisms of oversight and accountability in the security industry. These mechanisms include internal (e.g., company or industry) and external (e.g., expanding legislation) and formal (e.g., training or minimum standards) and informal (e.g., public/customer oversight) means.

I found Chapter 8, “The Security Officer,” which deals with functions performed by these private guards, interesting and thought provoking. Wakefield offers six categories of activities the guards conducted: “‘housekeeping,’ ‘customer care,’ ‘preventing crime and anti-social behaviour,’ ‘rule enforcement and the use of sanctions,’ responding to emergencies and offenses in progress’ and ‘gathering and sharing information’” (p.165). I comment here on two of these, ‘housekeeping’ and ‘preventing crime and anti-social behaviour.’ Housekeeping entails reporting small problems before they become big problems, such as leaking water or uncollected trash. While Wakefield notes, appropriately, that such activities are inconsistent with the macho image of security work, what struck me more about this role was how similar it was to the idea of “broken windows” (Wilson and Kelling 1982) and its theory of crime prevention.

Preventing crime and anti-social behavior gets to the heart of what most of us likely think of when we think of the role of security. This function also raises some of the hard questions about the rights of non-conformists in a public space (albeit privately owned) and the [*148] danger of legitimate crime prevention and criminal profiling measures degenerating into racial and other forms of stereotyping and discrimination. As Wakefield notes, in addition to preventing crime, security personnel “were required to prevent any behaviours that were seen to discourage the custom of other visitors” (p.170).

There were three categories of facility visitors who were subject to guard monitoring and surveillance: “those seen to be behaving in an ‘anti-social’ manner, those who fitted ‘risk profiles,’ and ‘known offenders’” (p.171). Security personnel had fairly broad criteria in identifying anti-social behavior, and it certainly included behaviors that were perfectly legal, such as begging. Risk profiles referred to likely criminal traits, behaviors, and attributes. These ranged from youth, to blackness, to homelessness, to actually criminal behavior, such as public masturbation. Although Wakefield acknowledged that prejudices “might” be behind some of these risk profiles, she seems to understate this problem, although she offers at least three examples of racist assumptions in her quotes from guards. ‘Known offenders’ were the most likely of the three candidates to actually be engaged in criminal behavior – shop lifting was a key concern – but here too deviancy rather than criminality seemed to shape guards’ views.

Despite the paramount place of crime prevention in the work of the private security industry, SELLING SECURITY notes that there are significant limits to the legal rights of those involved in private policing: “While their authority as agents of property afforded [security guards] the discretion to impose the sanction of exclusion, their authority beyond this was limited” (p.201). One implication of this limitation was that the private security agencies relied quite significantly on the police, and the police also benefited from the work of private security. Although to varying degrees in the three cases, the relationships were ones of “active partnership,” least so in the more troubled City Mall, which perhaps had the greatest need for police assistance.

This need for policing underscores the other side of the civil liberties coin: the right of people to be reasonably safe and comfortable in a public space. The legal standard for outsiders’ right to access private mass property is “reasonable access.” That standard, however, begs the question reasonableness standards always do: who defines reasonableness? In fairness, this question is not at the core of Wakefield’s study, and she does make some attempt to address it. Perhaps it is the impossibility of a satisfying solution rather than Wakefield’s failure to come up with one that continues to leave this reader perturbed about this issue.

In contrast, Wakefield’s work does provide an important reminder concerning one of the great fears of our time and society, namely terrorism. Terrorism as a real concern of both private and public policing is a consistent thread in her research. It is important to remind oneself, however, that her research took place in England in the 1990s, not in the United States post 9/11, 2001. In other words, we are reminded that the threat and reality of terrorism that is now used to attempt to cow a country and a world into [*149] submission is not new, and does not automatically legitimate the massive expansion of the U.S. security and repressive apparatus domestically and internationally.

Alison Wakefield’s study is not an exciting read, and it still bears the repetitive elements that seem intrinsic to doctoral dissertations, upon which this is based. But these concerns are minor: SELLING SECURITY it is a clearly written, well researched, and thorough contribution to the understanding of private security as a form of policing. It is to be welcomed and recommended. Her approach readily lends itself to adaptation in other countries and contexts, although her insights already reach beyond the British cases she studies.

REFERENCES:

Wilson, James Q., and George E. Kelling. 1982. “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety” ATLANTIC MONTHLY, March 1982, 29-37.