By Ben Grunwald, John Rappaport and Michael Berg

Private security officers outnumber police by a wide margin, and the gap may be growing. As cities have claimed to defund the police, many have quietly expanded their use of private security, reallocating spending from the public to the private sector. It is difficult to know what to make of these trends, largely because we know so little about what private security looks like on the ground. On one prevalent view of the facts, a shift from public to private security would mean little more than a change of uniform, as the two labor markets are deeply intertwined. Indeed, academics, the media, popular culture, and the police themselves all tell us that private security is some amalgam of a police retirement community and a dumping ground for disgraced former cops. But if, instead, private officers differ systematically from the public police—and crossover between the sectors is limited—then substitution from policing to private security could drastically change who is providing security services.

We bring novel data to bear on these questions, presenting the largest empirical study of private security to date. We introduce an administrative dataset covering nearly 300,000 licensed private security officers in the State of Florida. By linking this dataset to similarly comprehensive information about public law enforcement, we have, for the first time, a nearly complete picture of the entire security labor market in one state. We report two principal findings. First, the public and private security markets are predominantly characterized by occupational segregation, not integration. The individuals who compose the private security sector differ markedly from the public police; they are, for example, significantly less likely to be white men. We also find that few private officers, roughly 2%, have previously worked in public policing, and even fewer will go on to policing in the future. Second, while former police make up a small share of all private security, roughly a quarter of cops who do cross over have been fired from a policing job. In fact, fired police officers are nearly as likely to land in private security as to find another policing job, and a full quarter end up in one or the other. We explore the implications of these findings, including intersections with police abolition and the future of policing, at the paper’s close.

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Forthcoming . U of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 850. University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper No. 1004. Duke Law School Public Law & Legal Theory Series No. 2024-24

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Jovana Jezdimirovic Ranito

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “…September 16, 2007, Nisour Square in Baghdad, Iraq: Blackwater contractors, working under a State Department contract, kill 17 civilians and injure 20 during a firefight. Fast forward to September 11, 2009, Washington, DC: a Court of Appeals dismisses the charges against contractors and claims they were under US government contractor immunity. More recently, in 2014, after a number of appeals regarding the Court of Appeals and Supreme Court's decision about Abu Ghraib, which ended with a dismissal of charges, detainees filed a suit against contractors again, but still without a favorable outcome. Also, in 2015, in Washington, DC, four of the Blackwater contractors involved in the Nisour Square Massacre received a sentence from a federal judge after years of dismissals and new trials. These lengthy sentences were thrown out on August 4, 2017, by Federal Appeals Court and it ordered a new trial.

These examples are just the most reported ones, but they illustrate well the state of the US regulation regarding private security contractors operating in combat zones overseas…”

Switzerland. Palgrave Macmillan. 2019. 233p.

By Mark Button

Over the past few years there has been exponential growth in the private security industry as concerns about safety and risk have become increasing preoccupations in the western world. At the same time there has been a huge change in the balance and structure of policing in the direction of fragmentation and pluralisation. This book meets the need for a concise and up-to-date account of private policing, situating it within the context of the debates on policing more generally and the changing relationship between public and private policing. Private Policing examines the origins of private policing, the growing literature that has sought to explain its growth, and ways in which it has been defined and classified. These include the commercial security industry, policing functions exercised by the armed forces, local authorities, state departments and by voluntary policing bodies. The increasingly important issue of patrol by private policing bodies provides the focus for an important case study, exploring the implications of the exercise of patrol powers and functions by neighbourhood wardens, patrolling security officers and others.

Cullompton, Devon, UK: Willan Publishing, 2002. 176p.

Edited by Sabelo Gumedze

This monograph on private security in Africa is the part-result of a two-year research project on the Regulation of the Private Security Sector in Africa. This report is based on three country case South Africa. In these countries private security companies are involved in a number of security-related operations. This research project was inspired by the need for Africa to engage in the debate around the manifestation of the private security sector on the continent, and to support its effective regulation through the establishment of a consistent and logical regulatory framework for national, sub-regional and regional legislation and protocols. Little research has been undertaken to inform a thorough understanding of the private security industry in Africa. To this end, the country reports provide insightful findings and are aimed at influencing policy making at national, sub-regional and regional level.

Pretoria, South Africa: Institute for Security Studies, 2008. 124p.

Edited by Atsushi Yasutomi, Rosalie Arcala Hall, and Saya Kiba

An exploration of the roles that pro- and anti-government militias, private armed groups, vigilantes, and gangs play in local communities in the new democracies of Southeast Asia. Scholars have typically characterized irregular forces as spoilers and infiltrators in post-conflict peacebuilding processes. The contributors to this book challenge this conventional understanding of irregular forces in Southeast Asia, demonstrating that they often attract solid support from civilians and can be major contributors to the building of local security — a process by which local residents, in the absence of an effective police force, develop, partner or are at least included in the management of community crimes and other violence. They analyze irregular forces’ dealings with political actors at the community level, explaining why and how forces are incorporated in and collaborate with legitimate institutions without using violence against them. Offering a new approach to dealing with irregular forces in Southeast Asia, contributors explore new theoretical frameworks that are better suited for evaluating irregular forces’ relationship to different security providers and the political environments in the region. Specifically, they examine case studies from Indonesia, Timor-Leste, the Philippines, and Thailand. A valuable resource for researchers, students and practitioners in the areas of conflict resolution, peacebuilding, and security governance, especially those with a focus on Southeast Asia. This book will also be of great interest to scholars of the sociology and anthropology of the region.

Abington, Oxon, UK: New York: Routledge, 2022. 215p.

Edited by Millan, Matteo and Alessandro Saluppo

This book provides a comparative and transnational examination of the complex and multifaceted experiences of anti-labour mobilisation, from the bitter social conflicts of the pre-war period, through the epochal tremors of war and revolution, and the violent spasms of the 1920s and 1930s. It retraces the formation of an extensive market for corporate policing, privately contracted security and yellow unionism, as well as processes of professionalisation in strikebreaking activities, labour espionage and surveillance. It reconstructs the diverse spectrum of right-wing patriotic leagues and vigilante corps which, in support or in competition with law enforcement agencies, sought to counter the dual dangers of industrial militancy and revolutionary situations. Although considerable research has been done on the rise of socialist parties and trade unions the repressive policies of their opponents have been generally left unexamined. This book fills this gap by reconstructing the methods and strategies used by state authorities and employers to counter outbreaks of labour militancy on a global scale. It adopts a long-term chronology that sheds light on the shocks and strains that marked industrial societies during their turbulent transition into mass politics from the bitter social conflicts of the pre-war period, through the epochal tremors of war and revolution, and the violent spasms of the 1920s and 1930s. Offering a new angle of vision to examine the violent transition to mass politics in industrial societies, this is of great interest to scholars of policing, unionism and striking in the modern era.

Abingdon, Oxon. UK; New York: Routledge, 2021. 299p.

Edited by Atsushi Yasutomi, Rosalie Arcala Hall and Saya Kiba

An exploration of the roles that pro- and anti-government militias, private armed groups, vigilantes, and gangs play in local communities in the new democracies of Southeast Asia. Scholars have typically characterized irregular forces as spoilers and infiltrators in post-conflict peacebuilding processes. The contributors to this book challenge this conventional understanding of irregular forces in Southeast Asia, demonstrating that they often attract solid support from civilians and can be major contributors to the building of local security — a process by which local residents, in the absence of an effective police force, develop, partner or are at least included in the management of community crimes and other violence. They analyze irregular forces’ dealings with political actors at the community level, explaining why and how forces are incorporated in and collaborate with legitimate institutions without using violence against them. Offering a new approach to dealing with irregular forces in Southeast Asia, contributors explore new theoretical frameworks that are better suited for evaluating irregular forces’ relationship to different security providers and the political environments in the region. Specifically, they examine case studies from Indonesia, Timor-Leste, the Philippines, and Thailand. A valuable resource for researchers, students and practitioners in the areas of conflict resolution, peacebuilding, and security governance, especially those with a focus on Southeast Asia. This book will also be of great interest to scholars of the sociology and anthropology of the region.

Abingdon, Oxon ; New York: Routledge, 2022. 215p.

By Max G. Manwaring.

This monograph is intended to help political, military, policy, opinion, and academic leaders think strategically about explanations, consequences, and responses that might apply to the volatile and dangerous new dynamic that has inserted itself into the already crowded Mexican and hemispheric security arena, that is, the privatized Zeta military organization. In Mexico, this new dynamic involves the migration of traditional hard-power national security and sovereignty threats from traditional state and nonstate adversaries to hard and soft power threats from professional private nonstate military organizations. This dynamic also involves a more powerful and ambiguous mix of terrorism, crime, and conventional war tactics, operations, and strategies than experienced in the past. Moreover, this violence and its perpetrators tend to create and consolidate semi-autonomous enclaves (criminal free-states) that develop in to quasi-states—and what the Mexican government calls “Zones of Impunity.” All together, these dynamics not only challenge Mexican security, stability, and sovereignty, but, if left improperly understood and improperly countered, also challenge the security and stability of the United States and Mexico’s other neighbors..

Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College Press, 2009. 53p.