Interview with Clifford ShearingICPC-Given your vast experience in the field of private security since the 1980’s, what are some of the current trends in private security, and what issues do these trends raise for the governance of security?
C.S- Before I respond to your question, I will briefly provide some context. I think the most important thing to understand about private security, and the thing which strangely is not recognized often, is that private security is employed by corporations. It is not employed by corporations to pursue a public interest, but to pursue their own objectives, and address their own security concerns. Private security is primarily hired by business. This means that crime is not their focus. They are not focused on criminal law, or issues related to law enforcement, they are focused on security concerns of companies. These security concerns are always about a company’s well being, which very often, is related to profit. However, sometimes these companies contribute to wider community concerns. For example, a company that is running a gated community, a large shopping mall, or an airport or entertainment facility. When this happens, private security is concerned with managing what are essentially public spaces, but they are not doing so on behalf of the state, they are doing so on behalf of the companies whose job it is to manage those spaces. There are a variety of relationships which emerge between these companies and the people who are being managed in these public spaces.
An important point to emphasize is that one should not think about this as conventional policing. As I mentioned earlier, private security firms are not concerned with crime, they are concerned principally with things like loss. For them, crime is only one possible source of loss. So, private security are as interested in rain damage as they are in theft. Now because of their focus on loss, they tend to take a very anticipatory preventive approach. They are primarily concerned with minimizing opportunities for loss.
Over the years private security has remained remarkably stable, however, there are two main trends that I would like to highlight in particular here. Firstly, there has been a tendency of some private security organisations to become more like the public police in terms of law enforcement.
Secondly, the other main trend is the development of the private military police. You see this in countries such as Korea, and Iraq, and other regions of the world where private security companies are contracted to perform a variety of services, from protecting mines to developing infrastructure for national security. Just as private security has become a commodity that can be bought and sold on markets, some military activity has also become a commodity to be bought and sold.
A related trend that has implications for the broader domain of security is the emergence of non state agencies, deployed by private and state forces to engage in peace keeping and security.
So, we now have things happening above the state, within the state, and if you like, below the state that are creating the pie of security. The central message should be not let’s have a look at private security, but let’s use private security as a window of looking at what is happening to the bigger pie of security. One way that I have begun to think about this is through a particular conceptual framework, which I think of as nodal governance, which can assist in this process.
ICPC- What types of questions would accompany this conceptual framework, and how would security policy change as a result?
C.S- The types of questions which emerge here are: What are the different nodes that provide security? What are the different sources of direction and provision for security in any particular domain? How are they organized? How are they controlled? What impact does this have on total security? Finally, how can we adjust the way these nodes are all related so as to change outcomes so as to make them more desirable?
So, I think that security policy in the future is not going to be just about what are we going to do to improve the police, or how private security is to be regulated, but what is the mix of nodes we want. The question is, How do we want facilitate and control this nodal space? What has happened up till now is that states have done a lot of facilitating, but this has very often not been intentional. It has taken place because there are certain arenas in property law and contract law in particular that have allowed these things to happen. Now what we need to do is sit back and ask, given that all these things happened without much planning (unlike community policing which has been planned), what has happened, what parts of it can we say hmm, we never planned this, but this has turned out quite well. What parts of this equation are we less happy with, and what do we want to do about all of this?
A major problem is that there are not always the places to have these types of discussions. In other words, we do not always have the forums to allow these discussions to take place. We tend to focus on one institution in isolation from another -- asking what the police can do, what private security can do, rather than having a much broader view.
Another issue that private security trends raise is the issue of regulation. Regulation of private security has had for the most part a very narrow focus. It has mostly been done through national licensing which has concerned itself with knowing who the private agencies are, who the people they employ are, and setting national standards. It hasn’t been around ongoing oversight -- this is quite different to what we do with public security services. What I think is required in regulation is a recognition that private security is not a separate set of organizations. What you actually have is a single cloth of the provision of security, with different nodes which do different things which sometimes support each other, some times contest and sometimes are indifferent. What we need is a regulatory framework that looks at the whole cloth.
ICPC- How would you describe the division of labour that characterizes the public and private police?
C.S- Private security often works in partnership with the police service. For example, private security pass on to the police those cases that require, from their perspective, law enforcement. A good example would be in commercial shopping centres, where one of the ‘preventive controls’ they can employ -- because of property law -- is banishment orders, where people are banished from the property. If that banished person returns, private security then call the police who then enforce the trespassing law. What is interesting about this is that the discretion lies with private security. They are deciding who is to be banished, and then they are then relying on the police to enforce their banishment order.
Another example is how financial institutions deal with fraud or theft. Most of these issues will be dealt with internally. However, occasionally banks will decide to prosecute certain individuals. So once again, the decision to report certain incidences to the police lies with the financial institution, and their decision is not made on the basis of crime control, but on the basis of what is in their best interests. The police have very little option than to become engaged in this because the law requires them to.
Now all of this, as I have said, has come with the facilitation of national states. It is property law and contract law that allow this to take place. So, none of this is illegal. The issue of discretion is important to highlight in this larger discussion on private security.
Having said that private security exercises discretion in whether or not the police will be called upon to intervene in a particular situation, is not necessarily a bad thing. People who shop at shopping malls might be very pleased with what is going on, and people who live in gated communities may be very pleased with what is going on. The issue is that we need to look at the extent to which these common interests that are being pursued actually conform to the more general public interest.
Sometimes having the discretion localized with the people who are affected, which often happens in private security, is a good idea. This brings us to a central issue of private security- having greater self direction.
The advantages of having greater self direction tend to be available primarily to wealthy corporations and their corporate clients. This gives corporations (and their clients) greater self direction, and greater control of what their security will look like. They choose whether or not they will call upon the police, and they choose how preventive or reactive they want to be. This is something that we value in democracies --creating greater local control, and creating greater self direction. So we have to be very careful about not reacting simply negatively, as there are many pluses here that should be protected. However, we should also make sure that these pluses operate in a way that doesn’t undermine broader values.
There is something else too. Poor communities don’t get this greater degree of self direction. In many countries, such as South Africa, the wealthy get private security and the poor get the police. One of the greatest challenges, and I have been working on this in South Africa and Argentina, is how to achieve greater self direction and autonomy in, in poor communities, in solving local security problems. How can poor communities develop institutions that have relative autonomy which in turn work in partnership with the police, so that there are more equal partnerships -- similar to those built by corporate security.
ICPC-What factor (s) hinder the participation or integration of private security within larger community partnerships aimed at addressing local problems?
C.S- One of the main difficulties is that police officers may be very threatened by private security. Some think of private security as taking away jobs that somehow the police would have. One explanation for offloading responsibilities to the private sector is that state agencies do not have the resources. This is what I call the vacuum theory. The main assertion is that because state agencies can’t meet the demand of security, private security has grown.
If you adopt the vacuum theory, then you will adopt the immediate answer that what we need to do is to increase the resources of the police. While this may be true to some extent, generally I do not think this is true. Banks do not hire private security because they cannot get the attention of the police. Banks hire private security because the police won’t do, or cannot do, what they want them to. So what you have is an enlargement of the pie. Not a single pie that has been encroached upon. So the myth is that these are contesting components. But we don’t actually want the police to be doing certain things such as walking around buildings at night, looking to see if windows are left opened, making sure that people haven’t left their computers on so that they can be accessed without a password. These are the sorts of tasks that private security does. It is not because the police cannot do these things, or that there is too much of a demand. This is a different demand. It happens to be a demand that is often related to prevention but it is not a demand that the police should respond to.
ICPC- It has been said that new ideas about policing emerged after you made a particular visit you made to Disney World some years ago. Can you comment on this?
C.S- About 20 years ago, when my daughter was about 10 or 12, I took her and a friend to Disney World. From the time I entered the parking lot I was blown away by how safe and secure it was, and by the fact that there were no police officers to be seen, and no private security officers to be seen either. I asked myself at the time, what is going on here to create such a high degree of security and confidence when none of the traditional institutional mechanisms seemed to be available.
This gives me an opportunity to say something that I haven’t said up to now about our understanding of private security. We tend to think about private security as made up of security officers and investigators, however, this is an understanding that comes from our understanding of the public police. We regard security as an occupation, where we have officers, recruits, etc. There is this aspect to private security, but it is absolutely the smallest tip of a much larger iceberg.
Private security is a system that is embedded in lots of different occupational functions, and I saw this clearly for the first time in Disney World. I realized that every parking lot attendant, every little train driver, every gardener, every Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck had a security role. Private security is not a matter of security guards it is a security function that can be collected together in the body of one person, but is much more likely to be dispersed through lots of different people.
What Disney World shows is the possibility of high degrees of security without institutionalizing it in a particular occupation. It was there that I began to realize that I was not looking at security officers (public or private), but `at the governance of security.
ICPC- What are some of the ways to involve private security in crime prevention?
C.S- I am quite heavily involved in exploring this question. I am exploring the possibility of involving poor communities in partnerships with police that give them greater self direction, but also to ensure that they are working within broader frameworks and values that protect the public interest. I am interested in integrating the public interests with local interests. I have been working to develop institutional models which will allow for more equal partnerships to come about. Where you have poor people institutionalizing their capacities and knowledge in ways that give them autonomy and discretion in the same way that companies have.
At the same time, are able to orchestrate their capacities with those of the police. We are asking what can community members do well alone, and what do they need to work with the police on? What do the police do well alone, and what do they need to work with the communities on?
Basically, we have come up with a concept with the South African Police of Community Peace Centers, which involve groups of local community members who have developed the process of dispute resolution that deals with most of the things that come to the attention of police in South Africa. So anything related to drinking problems, money lending problems and all kinds of conflicts that can be dealt with without requiring law enforcement. The police are quite pleased about this. It releases their resources, because about two thirds of the cases go to dispute resolution.
ICPC- Given your work in the field over time, what are some of the issues left relatively unexplored in the area of private security?
C.S- Well, oddly enough, the very issue of corporate governance that manages all areas of our life remains largely unexplored. When you’ve got an elephant in the room with you, and you have all the accoutrements of the elephant around you, CCTV, private security officers, technological systems etc, and you can see all that, how come we talk about private security as if it was somehow not part of a system of corporate governance and control. In the area of private security, we know a lot about who is providing the provision and what provision is being provided. We know much less about their clients, the relationship between this provision and the client’s interest, and what the implications are for broader values.
I think we need to shift our attention more to the authorities and the entities directing private security. We know very little about corporate policy on security. We know a lot about government policy on security, but we somehow think that there is no corporate policy, that it all happens by accident. What happens at board meetings in devising security policies, what research informs their decisions about security?
What are the various auspices of authorities engaged in security and how can their efforts be best related and orchestrated, and what kind of regulatory mechanisms can we put in place to facilitate that orchestration. These questions are well worth pursuing.
ICPC- It has been an honour to interview you Mr Shearing. The amount of energy and effort that you and Phillip Stenning have devoted in the last two decades in helping to unravel the complexities surrounding this particular node of security is to be greatly commended.
Interview conducted by: Laura Capobianco, Analyst, ICPC
Date: June 1, 2005
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