The unloved business of private security

Summary - Is private security a good thing? The people who pay the many billions of rands that the industry turns over every year must think it is. Others, though, see private security as little more than the jack-booted reinforcers of our society’s principal social cleavages, a reincarnation of apartheid.

Why do some respond to private security in this way?

Part of the answer is that there really is a family resemblance between some of the services offered by the industry and the policing strategies of apartheid. The nature of these companies’ business, after all, means that they must constantly build barriers, physical and psychological, between their clients and the people whom those clients fear.

Related to this is the sense that there is something unjust about the fact that the rich can buy a level of security unattainable by the poor. It could not have escaped even a buyer of these services that his purchase of added security might be at the expense of transferring some risk onto others.

To have a reasonable discussion, we need to know the industry’s impact on crime levels. That requires solid, reliable information on whether private security makes its clients safer, whether all or much of the crime prevented in this way is merely displaced onto others, and whether any improvements in crime levels obtained in this way inevitably involve trampling on the rights of others.

When restaurants hire security companies to collect their cash in the morning, or when banks employ people to investigate frauds committed on themselves or their customers, they are using private security. So too are buildings that employ watchmen and shopping centres that put cameras and guards in their parking lots. Car guards, however annoying, are also a form of private security, as are the neighbourhood watches that patrol the streets of many a township, and which are often paid to do so by residents. “Private security” consists, then, of much more than boomed suburbs and armed response units.

Whether all these services actually make a difference, however, is a different question. It is also, unfortunately, one that has not yet been answered satisfactorily.

The impact of vehicle-tracking will explain some of the difficulties.

Since 1998/99, when tracking technology first hit the streets, combined figures for car theft and hijackings have fallen 17 per cent. A reasonable case could be made that the penetration of the technology has led directly to the decline in that crime because it changes the economics of car theft.

The purpose of these devices is to increase the possibility of a car thief being caught in the act. That is a depressing prospect for an ambitious thief, made more so by the reputation cops and security companies have for shooting first and asking questions later.

A car thief cannot know in advance whether a particular vehicle has a transmitter or not. As a result, rational thieves will tend more and more to look for alternative sources of income. That is something that improves the security of all drivers, not just those who are willing and able to pay for the service.

It is, therefore, conceivable that thieves and hijackers are doing something else with their time.

Therein lies the rub: just what do car thieves do when they don’t steal cars? On the one hand, car theft and hijacking are down. On the other, new crimes may have emerged.

Private security, like policing, is no panacea. It cannot secure its clients against all harm and often, like mercury on a plate, the attempt to suppress crime will simply end up pushing it around. Conversely, there will be times when the actions of private security firms will make everyone, not just their clients, safer. Precisely when and under what conditions this will happen is not easy to predict.

But the knee-jerk rejection that insists that “commodified security” only tramples human rights is not a serious response to a real problem.

Is private security a good thing? The people who pay the many billions of rands that the industry turns over every year must think it is. Others, though, are unconvinced, seeing private security as little more than the jack-booted reinforcers of our society’s principal social cleavages, a reincarnation of apartheid.

Writing in Business Day recently, Anthony Butler, a professor of public policy at the University of Cape Town, argued that the (largely white) middle classes have constructed a series of ‘privatopias’ — gated communities, exclusive malls, private game lodges — in which they live their lives. To make this possible, he wrote, “Their private security forces use hidden violence to keep poor black citizens at bay”. Their guards, he added, “trample on constitutional rights”.

This view also seems to have informed the South African Human Rights Commission investigation into gated communities, which concluded that, while they were not actually unconstitutional, they were certainly undesirable.

Why do some respond to private security in this way?

Part of the answer is that there really is a family resemblance between some of the services offered by the industry and the policing strategies of apartheid. The nature of these companies’ business, after all, means that they must constantly build and rebuild barriers, physical and psychological, between their clients and the people whom those clients fear.

Related to this is the sense that there is something unjust about the fact that the rich can buy a level of security unattainable by the poor. This is made more acute by a conviction that, in the words of a presentation made to a recent workshop hosted by the Open Society Foundation, a consequence of private security is that “certain areas tend to become over-policed while others become increasingly under-policed”.

This last must overstate the case. Except from an extreme libertarian perspective, it is hard to know what might be meant by the claim that an area is being “over-policed”. Nor is it clear how one area being over-policed by private security could lead to the “increasing” under-policing of other areas. It’s just as likely, surely, that the South African Police Service would re-deploy people out of areas with lots of security guards to those with none.

Still, the notion that the use of private security reinforces the unequal distribution of the risk of being victimised rings true. Indeed, it could not have escaped even a buyer of these services that his purchase of added security might be at the expense of transferring some risk onto others.

But totting up all the potential problems of what some sneeringly call “the commodification of security” does not exhaust a discussion of how our society ought to relate to the existence of this industry. To have a reasonable discussion, however, we do need to know what the industry’s impact on crime levels actually is. That requires solid reliable information on whether private security makes its clients safer, whether all or much of the crime prevented in this way is merely displaced onto others, and whether any improvements in crime levels obtained in this way inevitably involve trampling on the rights of others.

These are harder questions to answer than is usually acknowledged. We can begin to think about them, however, only when we recognise that private security covers a broad range of activities, many of which do not in any way reflect, reproduce or reinforce social divisions.

When restaurants hire security companies to collect their cash in the morning, or when banks employ people to investigate frauds committed on themselves or their customers, they are using private security. So too are buildings that employ watchmen and shopping centres that put cameras and guards in their parking lots. Car guards, however annoying, are also a form of private security, as are the neighbourhood watches that patrol the streets of many a township, and which are often paid to do so by residents.

“Private security” consists, then, of much more than boomed suburbs and armed response units. Though one can imagine ways in which those who provide any of these services might offend against some of the values our society holds dear, it seems more likely that most of the time these people go about their business in perfectly acceptable ways.

Whether all these services actually make a difference, however, whether they are worth what we pay for them or merely trade on our fears, is a different question. It is also, unfortunately, one that has not yet been answered satisfactorily. We simply do not know whether all the money spent on private security has any real impact on our overall levels of security.

The impact of vehicle-tracking will explain some of the difficulties in coming to a conclusive judgement.

Since 1998/99, when tracking technology first hit the streets, combined figures for car theft and hijackings have fallen 17 per cent. This might be a coincidence and it might reflect other factors, but a reasonable case could be made that the penetration of this technology has led directly to the decline in that crime because it changes the economics of car theft.

The purpose of these devices is to increase the possibility of a car thief being caught in the act. That is a depressing prospect for an ambitious thief, made more so by the reputation cops and security companies have for shooting first and asking questions later.

A car thief cannot know in advance whether a particular vehicle has a transmitter or not. Thus the assessment of the relationship between risk and reward has changed with the introduction and increasing sophistication of vehicle-tracking technology. As a result, rational thieves will tend more and more to look for alternative sources of income rather than risk being caught in a stolen car. That is something that improves the security of all drivers, not just those who are willing and able to pay for the service.

It is, therefore, conceivable that an important reason why the combined figures for car theft and hijacking are down is that thieves and hijackers are doing something else with their time.

Therein lies the rub: just what do car thieves do when they don’t steal cars?

In 2003, I spent some time at police stations around the country researching a book on the difficult, dangerous and frustrating business of policing. One of those stations, in the leafy suburbs of northern Johannesburg, was in the midst of a wave of seemingly inexplicable crimes. Every week, or so it seemed, someone was being held up and robbed in his or her driveway. But, although cars in the area were invariably expensive, the vehicles themselves were not being taken. Instead, after placing themselves in harm’s way, the robbers would take only what they could carry — the driver’s cell phone, wallet and laptop — and would escape in their own vehicle.

Now there may be any number of reasons why this crime should have emerged at this time, but one plausible explanation is that criminals were responding to the new risks created by tracking technology. In the face of this, they may have shifted modi operandi to manage their risk.

All of which must leave one feeling quite ambivalent about the impact of vehicle tracking on crime levels. On the one hand, car theft and hijacking are down. On the other, new crimes may have emerged. To make matters more complicated, if the new crimes are less lucrative than car theft, they may have to be committed more frequently to realise the same gain for the perpetrators.

An innovation in security, then, had had multiple effects. Some were good, some bad. Some were intended, others unintended. The question that arises is whether the impact of private security is always that ambiguous? Another story from the same station suggests it might not be.

When I had arrived at the station, its officers wasted no time in telling me of their disappointment with a particular private security company. Just the week before, I was told, one of its managers had actually witnessed a driveway robbery but hadn’t tried to stop the crime. Worse still, he’d given up following the suspects before he could guide the men in blue to the getaway car.

Later that week I heard another version, this time offered by the security guard in question.

It turned out that he had not seen the robbery itself. Instead he’d been roving around the area looking for a suspicious vehicle that one of his static guards had told him about. As he’d come round a corner, he’d seen three men scrambling into a vehicle. From the look of the shocked-but-unharmed woman standing next to her car across the street, he guessed that he’d just missed a driveway robbery.

Being outnumbered and in a soft-skinned vehicle, he chose to follow the suspects and immediately got on the phone to 10111 in an effort to guide the flying squad to the escaping men. But he hadn’t been able to follow through because moments later one of his clients in the area pushed a panic button.

The alarm, as it happened, belonged to the neighbour of the woman who’d just been held up; the actual victim was not a client of his reaction company. The neighbour, having been told of the crime, but in no real need of her armed response, was just doing what she believed was the decent thing.

“I didn’t have a choice,” the manager said unapologetically. “My clients pay me to respond, so when they push the button, I drop what I’m doing and I respond. That’s what comes first.”

Police dismay at this was perfectly understandable. This had been a gilt-edged opportunity to nail some of the people terrorising the community, and it had slipped through their fingers because the man following the suspects was accountable only to his clients. If he’d been a police officer, under the same circumstances he might have been told to stay in pursuit while others responded to the apparent emergency.

Again, then, one might have a somewhat ambivalent response to this story: the security officer did his duty as he saw it but the car thieves escaped, clearly not the socially optimal outcome.

Except that this response ignores a fundamental fact. In the absence of the security guard who noticed a suspicious vehicle, in the absence of a supervisor in an unmarked car with the wit to follow the thieves and call in the flying squad, the robbers would still have committed the crime and would still have escaped. The cops would have come no closer to getting their men.

No one, in other words, was made any worse off by the actions of the private security company. Indeed, if the neighbour had not pressed her panic button when she did, the whole community, whether subscribers to a private security company’s services or not, might well have been quite a lot better off.

And this, surely, is the point. Private security, like policing, is no panacea. It cannot secure its clients against all harms and often, like mercury on a plate, the attempt to suppress crime will simply end up pushing it around. Conversely, there will be times when the actions of private security firms will make everyone, not just their clients, safer. Precisely when and under what conditions this will happen is not easy to predict.

But the knee-jerk rejection that insists that “commodified security” only tramples human rights is not a serious response to a real problem.