Private Security Industry Growth in Western Countries

The Private Security Industry

The organization of policing has been restructured globally over the last 25 years. A major development is that certain public functions of social control and order maintenance are shifting toward private organizations. In this respect, it is worth noting the “multilateralization process” of providing security. Both the state and nonstate sectors are directly involved in the governance of security, and public–private divisions of tasks have become blurred. Public authorities are now embedded in “nodes of governance”—a multifarious interlocking of state, market, and civil society. It is particularly commercial organizations in the West that play an increasingly important role in protecting the citizens of nation–states. In some contemporary societies, uniformed private guards even outnumber national police forces.

Private contract security companies employing guards are most well known and most visible in shopping malls, business complexes, airports, and other quasi-public spaces. At present, surveillance officers occupy a major position in the “extended police family.” The security industry, however, has swept the market with an array of other products and services and is still growing. Important professions are private detectives, forensic accountants, proprietary or “in-house” security, central alarm respondents, armed couriers, and a wide range of jobs including door supervisors, bodyguards, stewards, and producers of technical security equipment.

This diversification of the security business makes it hard to make clear statements about the shape and size of this industry. Different definitions sometimes exclude specific private security segments, which has an indisputable impact on the measurements of the industry. Furthermore, actual data hardly differentiate between full-time and part-time security personnel. This distinction could make a huge difference in the extent of the actual workforce. A second and related problem is the quality of empirical sources. Information about the commercial industry is hard to obtain, and the little available data are often not very reliable. What trends nonetheless make clear is that the private security industry around the modern world has grown significantly.

Private Security around the Western World

Drawing on academic literature and national statistics, a comparative overview of the private security industry in 31 Western countries is provided. In addition, attention will focus on the issues of legal regulation, licenses, and training. Presented results must be treated with caution because of the problems mentioned above. Tables 1, 2, and 3 show the absolute and relative numbers of private security employees, the strength of police forces, and the [Page 1262]ratio between private security employees and police.

United States

The first study conducted on private guards in the United States was published in 1971, followed by a second publication in 1977. These studies are known as the RAND reports. The latter report indicates that 429,000 people were employed in the private security industry in 1972. At the same time, the public sector employed 694,000 officers. A total of U.S. $12 billion was spent on crime security forces, including nearly U.S. $4 billion on the private security sector.

In 1985 and 1990, two other reports on private security were published by Hallcrest Systems, Inc. The second report predicted that private security employment (excluding proprietary guards) would grow from 556,200 in 1980 to almost 1.5 million in 2000. These numbers indicate an enormous growth of the security market, outnumbering the total U.S. police forces and public expenditures on crime by far. It is suggested that there are approximately two times as many people employed in the private security sector as there are in the public security sector. These measurements might be an exaggeration as a result of imprecise data. The U.S. Department of Labor reports that security guards (including surveillance officers in casinos) and private investigators hold approximately 1,140,000 jobs, and private security is a multibillion industry (2000 estimate).

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