RALEIGH, N.C. -- Kevin Watt crouched down to search the rusted Cadillac he had stopped for cruising the parking lot of a Raleigh apartment complex with a broken light. He pulled out two open Bud Light cans, an empty Corona bottle, rolling papers, a knife, a hammer, a stereo speaker, and a car radio with wires sprouting out.
"Who's this belong to, man?" Watt asked the six young Latino men he had frisked and lined up behind the car. Five were too young to drink. None had a driver's license. One had under his hooded sweat shirt the tattoo of a Hispanic gang across his back.
A gang initiation, Watt thought.
With the sleeve patch on his black shirt, the 9mm gun on his hip and the blue light on his patrol car, he looked like an ordinary police officer as he stopped the car on a Friday night last month. Watt works, though, for a business called Capitol Special Police. It is one of dozens of private security companies given police powers by the state of North Carolina -- and part of a pattern across the United States in which public safety is shifting into private hands.
Private firms with outright police powers have been proliferating in some places -- and trying to expand their terrain. The "company police agencies," as businesses such as Capitol Special Police are called here, are lobbying the state legislature to broaden their jurisdiction, currently limited to the private property of those who hire them, to adjacent streets. Elsewhere -- including wealthy gated communities in South Florida and the Tri-Rail commuter trains between Miami and West Palm Beach -- private security patrols without police authority carry weapons, sometimes dress like SWAT teams and make citizen's arrests.
In other words, we've got private security firms patrolling public streets as regular police officers. This is disturbing. When you look at the above story, this security officer Kevin Watt is patrolling an area armed with a handgun. What kind of firearms training has Capitol Special Police given to Watt? If Watt had to draw his gun, shoot and kill one of the Latino men in a violently escalating situation, what would have been the consequences of this supposed shooting and killing? It is bad enough for police to be shooting, and possibly killing, suspects during the course of their law enforcement duties, but to have a private security office shoot and kill a suspect while engaging in duties reserved for law enforcement officials? Continuing with the WaPost story:
Private security guards have outnumbered police officers since the 1980s, predating the heightened concern about security brought on by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. What is new is that police forces, including the Durham Police Department here in North Carolina's Research Triangle, are increasingly turning to private companies for help. Moreover, private-sector security is expanding into spheres -- complex criminal investigations and patrols of downtown districts and residential neighborhoods -- that used to be the province of law enforcement agencies alone.
The more than 1 million contract security officers, and an equal number of guards estimated to work directly for U.S. corporations, dwarf the nearly 700,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the United States. The enormous Wackenhut Corp. guards the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia and screens visitors to the Statue of Liberty.
"You can see the public police becoming like the public health system," said Thomas M. Seamon, a former deputy police commissioner for Philadelphia who is president of Hallcrest Systems Inc., a leading security consultant. "It's basically, the government provides a certain base level. If you want more than that, you pay for it yourself."
I'm not sure I like the idea of the public police becoming like the public health system. In our disaster of a public health system, the richer you are, the greater the quality and amount of health services you can get for your money. Those who are poor, or uninsured, have almost no health care, or they go to the emergency room for medical care at the state's expense. You can almost see where this will go regarding police services. Wealthy cities and towns will contract out more police services to private companies, while poorer cities and towns will rely solely on local police services--perhaps even cutting back on the local police budget when money is tight. With less police officers on the streets of poorer cities and towns, the crime rate may start to rise in those areas. Taxpayers in wealthy cities and towns will complain that their tax dollars are being used to subsidize law enforcement for the poorer cities, while they are paying for more law enforcement with their own local police services and the police services provided by the private contractors. Are we going to see a two-tiered police protection in our society--between the haves and have-nots?
And there is more here in the WaPost article:
The trend is triggering debate over whether the privatization of public safety is wise. Some police and many security officials say communities benefit from the extra eyes and ears. Yet civil libertarians, academics, tenants rights organizations and even a trade group that represents the nation's large security firms say some private security officers are not adequately trained or regulated. Ten states in the South and West do not regulate them at all.
Some warn, too, that the constitutional safeguards that cover police questioning and searches do not apply in the private sector. In Boston, tenants groups have complained that "special police," hired by property managers to keep low-income apartment complexes orderly, were overstepping their bounds, arresting young men who lived there for trespassing.
In 2005, three of the private officers were charged with assault after they approached a man talking on a cellphone outside his front door. They asked for identification and, when he refused, followed him inside and beat him in front of his wife and three children.
Lisa Thurau-Gray, director of the Juvenile Justice Center at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, said private police "are focusing on the priority of their employer, rather than the priority of public safety and individual rights." But Boston police Sgt. Raymond Mosher, who oversees licensing of special police, says such instances are rare.
Private security companies will have a greater interest in maintaining their profits, rather than performing a public service of policing public areas. The danger here is that if costs increase to the point of eroding their profit margin, then these companies are certainly going to start cutting costs on training new security officers--especially if there is a lack of state or federal regulations regarding the training programs for these new "private police officers." And if these security firms are publicly traded companies, then they are going to be under even more pressure by Wall Street to maintain their profit margins. There is the lack of constitutional safeguards which apply to these private police officers. Police officers in the United States operate under a defined criminal procedure, using probable cause as the standard for arresting a suspect. There is a specific legal system here in place in which a police officer must adhere to when performing his or her job duties. If an officer deviates from this system, then there are legal procedures to investigate or discipline the officer's conduct. A police officer cannot simply barge into a man's home and beat him up in front of his wife and children. What constitutional safeguards are there to protect the public from the use of excessive force from these rent-a-cops? And if these rent-a-cops do cross over the line, which provides constitutional protections to the public, what procedures are there to punish these rent-a-cops--especially if their actions result in the death of a suspect or other individuals? Even if these situations may be rare now, how often will these situations increase once more cities and towns contract more police services from these private companies? The worst-case scenario that I can think of is if several of these rent-a-cops end up killing an individual under suspicious circumstances, while acting as private police officers, how will the private company respond to this event? Will the company look towards the benefit of public safety, even if it would mean negative public exposure to the company or investigations into the company's operations and procedures? Or will the company put up a serious marketing and PR-spin as a means of CYA to the detriment of public safety?
Then there is the profit margin. Private security firms are going to charge the state, local governments, businesses or property owners for their private police officers and services. According to the WaPost:
Capitol Special Police's owner, Roy G. Taylor, was chief of three small nearby police departments and held state law enforcement jobs before starting the company in 2002. As Hispanic gangs were increasing, he said, "I saw a niche." The company has eight officers, some of whom are part time while working for area police departments.
They have used batons and pepper spray but have not fired a service weapon, Taylor said. Once, in an apartment complex where they worked in nearby Carrboro, Capt. Nicole Howard, Taylor's wife, dressed in plain clothes to attract a convicted rapist who had been peering in windows and stalking women. Then she arrested him for trespassing.
Today, charging $35 per hour, the firm has contracts with four apartment complexes, a bowling alley, two shopping centers and a pair of private nightclubs. A few weeks ago, two of the Taylors' employees, Capt. Kenny Mangum and Officer Matt Saylors, walked over to a car at the nightclub Black Tie to warn the men inside not to loiter in the parking lot. Catching a whiff of marijuana, they found seven rocks of crack cocaine in the ashtray and two handguns under the seat of the driver, who was a convicted felon. They called the Raleigh police to handle the arrest.
Because they are part of a private company, Taylor and his officers are mindful that customers are billed for the time they spend testifying in court.
Not only are these private police firms charging their clients for policing their client's premises, but they also charge their clients for the time the officers spend testifying in court. How long will it be for a private security firm to demand arrest quotas from their private police officers--especially if this security firm is contracted by a state or local government for these private police officers? The more arrests these private officers make, the more court trials they will attend to testify, and the more money the private security firm can charge the state or local government for their police services. If more private security firms enter this market of private police officers, the market becomes more competitive, and the prices for the services of these private police officers may start to drop. The private security firms may be forced to demand arrest quotas from their officers as a means to market just how better their officers are to the competition--Look! Our private police officers have made more arrests and have taken more criminals off the streets than our competitors! Therefore, our private police officers are better value at stopping crime! Send your law enforcement dollars to us!
This is a very disturbing trend.
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