Policing has undergone profound changes in the United States and elsewhere since 1960, and the evolution of public-private partnerships is among the most significant of these changes. This article identifies and describes the sources of this development, its various manifestations, and implications for security in both the public and private sectors. Policies and programs designed to shape and manage partnerships between public law enforcement and private security agencies are then considered, along with their potential effects on public and private institutions and the general public. The essay concludes with a consideration of the prospects for the future of public-private policing partnerships.
Private security has been defined in various ways. For current purposes, it will mean services other than those provided by public law enforcement and regulatory agencies engaged primarily in the prevention and investigation of crime, loss, or harm to specific individuals, organizations, or facilities. It typically includes the work of security guards, corporate security and loss prevention personnel, private investigators, armored vehicle personnel, manufacturers of security equipment, locksmiths, alarm and surveillance specialists, security consultants and engineers, and people involved in a variety of related activities from private forensic laboratory scientists to guard dog trainers and drug testing specialists.
The Origins of Public-Private Partnerships in Policing
Public law enforcement officials have relied on private citizens for information in solving crimes and assisting the prosecutor in convicting offenders for centuries, long before the emergence of the first truly professional metropolitan police department in London in 1829. Bounty programs had been in effect for centuries prior to that, sometimes under the authority of the executive branch of government and sometimes under the jurisdiction of the courts, to encourage private citizens to bring information to law enforcement officials to assist them in solving crimes and bringing offenders to justice.
The professionalization of policing in the nineteenth century served to substantially legitimize and strengthen public safety and security as a more exclusively public sector responsibility, first in the United Kingdom and eventually in the United States and elsewhere. This began to change in the United States in the 1960s, as soaring crime rates exposed serious flaws in the professional model of policing. In 1960, police departments had been comfortably operating out of a set of notions about professionalism that had served the public well for decades, ideas that came to be substantially modified toward the end of the twentieth century: that the police were the primary authorities on crime and how to respond to it, that police supervisors and executives were the locus of authority within the police hierarchy, that it was too risky to allow patrol officers to exercise substantial discretion even in routine matters, that the basic pathways to reduced crime were through more rapid response to calls for service and more arrests, that more police could only help to increase arrest rates and shorten response times, that the public was not equipped to provide much help to police other than as witnesses, that building good community relations was useful primarily for damage control rather than as an end in itself, and that adherence to these precepts would give the police a better image and earn respect among the general public. This model of policing made sense in the first half of the twentieth century, when many police departments throughout the country had been struggling for years to overcome reputations for ineptness, corruption, and brutality.
Several factors emerged in the 1960s and 1970s that induced police practitioners and policing scholars to reassess the professional model. The fact that professionalism did little to stem the explosion in crime during this period was surely one factor: Homicide rates doubled and burglary and robbery rates tripled nationwide, and they increased even more in large urban centers. Research conducted in the 1970s found little support for notions that were core aspects of the professional model: that saturation random patrols would be effective in reducing the time to respond to calls for service, increasing crime clearance rates and reducing crime rates. In fact, rapid police response was found to contribute little to the solving of crimes. The most critical delays were private, between the time of the offense and the time of the call for service. After the first few minutes of the commission of the crime, it was learned that it makes little difference whether the police arrive afterward in a matter of seconds or minutes.
Adjustments to the crime explosion and information about the ineffectiveness of standard practices were eventually made, first in the private sector. Commercial establishments and citizens who could afford private protection chose not to wait for breakthroughs in public policing that would make them safer. Corporate complexes, shopping malls, sports arenas, and small businesses hired security guards, installed surveillance and alarm systems, and hardened targets with stronger locks, doors, and new architectural designs and layouts. Many private households employed such resources as well, with some of the more affluent citizens moving to gated communities that probably made them less vulnerable to crime and, in any case, helped make them feel safer.
The numbers associated with this shift to privatization are not precisely known, but they have been estimated to be substantial. Although the number of sworn officers exceeded the number of persons employed in the private security field in the 1960s, by 1990 the numbers had shifted to the point where an estimated three persons were employed in private security for every sworn officer in the United States (Forst and Manning 1999).
Few accounts of the history of policing give significant attention to this explosion in private policing in the 1970s and 1980s. It is widely asserted that the professional era of the mid-twentieth century gave way eventually to the era of community policing by the end of the century. A more compelling case can be made that the professional era gave way to the era of privatization throughout the 1970s and most of the 1980s, before community policing resurrected public policing. This unprecedented shift to the private market for security occurred initially with little coordination with public policing authorities.
In time, however, it became clear that lack of coordination between public and private policing frequently produced serious lapses, and that more thoughtfully developed public-private coordination was essential. Awareness of this need arose naturally as private security agents found themselves charging more and more suspects with crimes and turning them over to local police. The police found some of these cases too trivial to bring to the prosecutor, others worthy of formal arrest and prosecution but in need of additional evidence and information, and still others ready to take forward to prosecution without further work. Improved coordination became apparent especially in the first two categories. Even when private security agents fully expected the police to refuse to process a case for prosecution, it became a common practice for security guards to detain suspects, with aims of achieving at least modest levels of deterrence and retribution. This practice may deter impressionable young first offenders, but may have little effect on others, and could well induce still others to commit more crimes in the future, upon learning that the formal system of justice does not take their crimes seriously.
The Maturing of Public-Private Partnerships
Police departments became increasingly aware of the need for improved coordination in the late 1980s and 1990s, as community policing gained currency among municipal police departments throughout much of the United States and in developed nations throughout the world. Partnership with the public is, after all, the central principle of community policing— an expanded awareness of the needs of local individuals and improved coordination with private institutions serving local neighborhoods.
In moving from principle to action, a particularly valuable resource for improved coordination soon became evident to the police: Private security agents were often more familiar than sworn officers with certain crimes in the places in which they operated, including the sources of those crimes. The advantages of improved coordination became equally apparent to the more professional of the private security agents, who were keenly aware that their livelihoods and reputations depended on their ability to deal with crimes quickly and effectively, and working more effectively with the local police in those areas could enhance the prospects of bringing offenders to justice.
Perhaps the most pervasive form of these partnerships consists of government purchases of private security resources to protect the public, government facilities, personnel, and operations. Communities throughout the United States, burdened with the difficulties and expenses of maintaining conventional police services, have elected to bypass their police agencies and contract out substantial portions of public protective services to civilians and private agencies, especially functions on the periphery of front-line crime control and investigation: providing technical assistance at crime scenes, serving summonses, moving and monitoring suspects and prisoners, managing juveniles, providing court security, conducting traffic control, and so on. These activities have been found to be well within the capacities of private agents. Sworn officers are expensive to recruit and train, and more expensive still to maintain, given relatively high salaries and costly fringe benefits, indirect and support costs, and pension programs. Moreover, many private agents are former police officers with extensive experience in policing.
Lakewood, Colorado, a city in the Denver area with some 150,000 residents, hires trained citizen volunteers for police support services, including fingerprinting, issuing of parking tickets, enforcing graffiti violations, doing investigative follow-up work, and preparing affidavits. The Lakewood Police Department also contracts with a private security firm to guard hospitalized prisoners and provide assistance in protecting crime scenes. These officers provide twenty-four-hour assistance and often attend the department’s roll calls for training. Many are certified police officers in the state of Colorado (Youngs 2004). Such arrangements are common in communities throughout the United States.
They are common elsewhere in the world as well. Much of Great Britain and Australia have developed public-private partnerships in policing, including both the police department’s contracting out of policing functions to private agents and the development of collaborations between sworn police and private security agents operating independently in a particular jurisdiction (Sturgess 2002). The Vera Institute has reported a similar array of public-private policing partnerships in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa (Bhanu and Stone 2004).
The privatization of services previously done by sworn officers, even when under contract with police departments, is a type of public-private partnership, but is fundamentally different from partnerships in which sworn officers collaborate with private security agents already working in the jurisdiction. In Great Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair has strongly discouraged the former and encouraged the latter as a means of providing public services generally (Sturgess 2002). Of course, much of this is based on political considerations rather than economic, driven by Blair’s Labor Party ties to government employment unions and concerns about the loss of jobs. In Britain, as in the United States, many policing functions previously done by sworn officers, both in the form of back-office technical support and frontline policing service, have in fact been turned over to civilian specialists and contracted out to private security agencies with a net gain in employment, and few take serious issue with the increases in efficiency that also result from these arrangements.
Circumventing public expenses through privatization and civilianization has not been costless. State and local government spending on private services escalated from $27 billion in 1975 to some $100 billion in 1987, with the federal sector contributing another $197 billion of public expenditures for private security services in 1987. Los Angeles County awarded dozens of contracts for guard services in the early 1980s at an estimated 74% of the cost of the county policing alternative. Other municipalities have gone still further, experimenting with all-private police forces, and have found them capable of delivering high-quality services at lower costs (Forst 2000).
More conventional public-private partnerships manifest through both formal and informal mechanisms. The informal arrangements are the most common and often the most effective. They arise naturally through situational needs that can occur daily; or occasionally in the form of breakfast and luncheon meetings between sworn officers and private agents, typically without a formal agenda; and sometimes as flexibly coupled teams and task forces. They sometimes arise in a more structured way through formal public-private alliances with periodic meetings: to deal with specific problems, often related to gangs, hot spots, or other chronic issues that interfere with both public and private interests; to draft legislation on the licensing of private security functions; to arrange training programs for sworn officers or private agents; or to share information of a more general nature, such as technology or new strategies for protecting property and enhancing security. An even more structured arrangement occurs in the form of partnership contracts, such as the creation of ”business improvement districts” that work out specific divisions of responsibility between sworn officers and private security agents working in a common area (Connors, Cunningham, and Ohlhausen 1999).
These various forms of public-private partnership have not always been simple and riskless. As the partnerships have matured, specific problems have become readily apparent. Foremost among these have been occasional tensions between enhanced public security and police legitimacy. Closer public partnerships with private institutions can and often do serve special interests, through financial and nonfinancial inducements that attract police away from their larger responsibility to protect and serve the general public. This can and often does come at a steep cost to the integrity and reputation of police departments and individual officers.
The primary problem arises from the fact that private security personnel are agents accountable to the principal who hires them, while sworn officers are accountable to the much broader public at large. From the perspective of the private security agents, the partnership must serve the principal, and from the perspective of the police department the partnership must serve the general public. Individual officers frequently face conflicts between their sworn duty to serve the general public and the sometimes strong draw to serve some constituents disproportionately, often through seemingly benign favors or privileges. Officers working at night as security guards for commercial establishments face a conspicuous conflict of interests in their daytime beats. Many police departments have imposed clear restrictions against such moonlighting arrangements, but many have not. Public agencies should make clear to their officers that compromising the public interest is unacceptable, that they cannot accept such inducements and continue to receive full benefits as sworn officers.
Another problem is that private security personnel are not subject to the same standards of screening and eligibility as are sworn officers, hence they can be a less reliable resource for public safety. This can pose problems when the private agents represent the police department even in an auxiliary capacity. Police departments might have good reasons to limit the closeness of partnerships with people who can bring more troubles than benefits to the department. Clearly, the formation of specific partnerships with private agents must be sufficiently flexible to ensure that the benefits of the partnerships exceed the burdens to the greatest extent possible. No formula can be given in advance to determine the scope and nature of a particular partnership, other than that the arrangement should be fluid enough to accommodate changing circumstances and needs.
Trends and Implications for the Public and Private Policing Sectors
The rise of a substantial and multifaceted private security industry has imposed new demands on and problems for police departments, but it has simultaneously raised rich opportunities for law enforcement agencies to leverage their scarce resources toward a more effective and efficient capacity for serving the general public. As they exploit such opportunities, however, the police must be mindful of the need to develop partnerships with private agents with eyes wide open to the risks inherent in those pursuits. A fundamental objective should be to establish a coherent framework for assessing public-private partnerships, to ensure that arrangements that bolster public safety and security are strengthened while ones that harm society or offer costly, ineffective, or ethically dubious solutions to security are quickly revealed and aborted.
Are partnerships involving sworn officers, private security personnel, and civilians generally superior to the use of any of these components alone? Can future police partnerships with private businesses be structured more constructively, without eroding the legitimacy of police organizations? Should we expect these partnerships to be adversely affected in the new era of terrorism? One answer to all of these questions is clear: Sweeping generalizations are dangerous and cookie cutter solutions are likely to be unsuccessful. To be effective, public-private security partnerships must be developed situationally. This has been established cross-nationally (Bhanu and Stone 2004), and it is likely to be equally true from one jurisdiction to another within any large political entity.
The varieties of public policing, private security forces, and modes of civilianiza-tion are as vast as the needs of the public. Private security alternatives range from well-trained and well-paid agents, often current or former sworn officers who operate in coordination with municipal police departments, to plant guards whose job is simply to call the police when they observe suspicious activity, to vigilante groups and gang-like organizations that often compete with local police for the control of neighborhoods. Similarly, civilianization in a given department may be warranted for some positions but not others, depending on the needs of the community, the skills of the sworn officers, local labor market conditions, and other factors. Meaningful comparisons require a thorough assessment of the key particulars in the matter.
As local budgets for public safety continue to become constricted by taxpayers increasingly unwilling to tax themselves, municipal police and county sheriff’s departments must find new ways to leverage their scarce resources by building even stronger alliances with private security agencies and personnel that satisfy conventional norms of legitimacy. When they fail to do so, they risk losing some of their most capable officers to lucrative positions as private investigators and executives of private security agencies.
The great challenge in forming effective public-private partnerships for the future is to do so with job enrichment inducements that maintain the loyalty of the most valuable personnel resources. Opportunities to prevent and solve potentially grave problems in the new era of terrorism certainly provide one such inducement. Officers so motivated are less likely to be interested in leaving the department and less likely to bend when faced with tensions between public responsibilities and private inducements. Partnerships are fine when they serve the general public, but they must be built on a foundation that ensures that the officer’s overarching responsibility to serve public interests will not be compromised.
More enlightened policing, especially in the form of community policing and problem-oriented policing, has been credited with a substantial share of the decline in crime throughout the end of the twentieth and early part of the twenty-first centuries. One cannot discard the prospect that improved public-private partnerships in policing have contributed to these developments. As long as police departments maintain a healthy set of incentives and provide strong, ethical leadership, the public safety sector should be able to build on these gains for the foreseeable future.
