Insecure and Irresponsible

    Does your company change security policies only after an incident or injury, or believes everyone has the same common sense and so just hires anybody to do Security?

    Is your security workforce comprised of young cop wannabes, aimless burnouts or oldsters supplementing pensions?

    Do you worry about your parked car and your safety to and from it, or wonder if the building guard is sleeping, stealing, stalking or an undisclosed felon?

    You should.

    Private security personnel aren't well vetted nor have much security training - yet their desire to emulate cops, with badges, handcuffs, nightsticks, electric stun weapons, chemical spray and often loaded guns is obviously beyond the pale of anyone's common sense.

    Outnumbering police about four-to-one, Guards are more vital to the prevention of theft, rape, murder and terrorist acts than ever. But be honest. Do Security Guards give you peace-of-mind or make you cringe? A bit of each perhaps?

    Society apparently views guards as bumbling fools while expecting super-human performance from them in time of crisis. So it's not uncommon to vacillate apropos of protectors responsible for your safety sans abilities to perform the job.  

    Why the problem? Perhaps it's the Security industry's 100-to-300% annual workforce turnover - the trading upon revolving-door employees it doesn't trust or try to retain.

    Despite progressive training for police and the military and thirty years of regulatory predication by it's auditors (1), the security community will not upgrade the proficiency of it’s estimated 1.4 million Security Guards (2), nor reconcile either extreme of its employees, as fools or heroes, toward a single model of competency.

   Instead, it hawks more and greater spyware, as if robot surveillance compensates inabilities to manage personnel - as if products and not better jobs are it's answer to your safety - as if it’s OK to video you being beaten or raped in lieu of a Guards' preventing it.

    It's not good enough. The Security Community has played fast and loose with both your safety and your money for untold years, sticking you the consumer with no resort.

   Hence the reason for this article. In it, I explain the inconsistencies of the security guard gambit based on often-wry observation, and give recommendations for sustainable solutions to the problem.

    I want the reader to discover why the security community gets away with what they've done wrong all these years, and how easily we can create not just new jobs, but a sustainable career field for our security personnel.

The Scapegoat Bazaar

    Most Americans little know or care that the backbone of their nation’s security is built of unskilled, low paying, transitional jobs employing college students, immigrants, the retired and aimless dishonest persons of all ages.

    Becoming a security guard is customarily easy, as aspirants fill applications, sign statements of honesty, are shown “training videos” designed to indemnify their employers and issued new or used uniforms with a badge - although specialty badges are becoming prohibitively expensive - and put to work within hours on a night shift, alone.

    Orientation to the new job is a generally hasty one given by a harried field supervisor who must zip to several other posts that shift. So urgently needed could be that guard, to replace one who never showed or was fired, that the laxity and/or delay of criminal history checks potentially place the proverbial fox in the henhouse.

    The quick and easy placement of a new security guard is a good thing for the layabout but not for the career-minded, because four cascading conspiracies make the job a chump’s game, as --

    [1] No reliable databases exist to verify Guard qualifications, causing…

    [2] Guard agencies to hire unskilled labor in order to ‘train their own way’(4), exacerbating...

    [3] Small pay and no benefits, with guards occasionally expected to work as IRS 1099 contractors, creating...

    [4] Job instability, with guard leasing agencies coming and going like bad restaurants, and contract employees often bought and sold like plantation slaves.

    Dismal footing like this certainly doesn’t inspire the 12% to 25% of guards with a casual attitude for work though, making the profit-eating roving supervisor a must-have for any agency.

    Because, when a guard doesn’t show up for an assignment it’s the hapless rover who personally races to the jobsite before the client finds out, to be confined to the unfamiliar post until an equally clueless substitute is found and situated.

    Thusly, new hires are posted at trouble spots - like fingers in a leaky dike - until they "prove themselves capable" of a more permanent post when one appears, no matter their expertise.

    Tactically then, newly hired guards can be worked forty hours at odd trouble spots immediately and laid off until the next pay period to save the agency on overtime costs (5). But with so many no-shows creating an overtime-catch-22, extra shifts are always available to fatigued menials with unpaid bills, which is forever hazardous to your safety.

    Of one agency I studied; it unable to handle scheduling conflicts or match personalities to assignments, and by blaming supervisors for uncontrollable overtime costs, went through nine roving field supervisors in one fiscal year - which I found to be the business norm.

    The way guard agencies stay afloat, then, is by keying their foremost service not to that of more capable personnel, but instead the immediate replacement or dismissal of personnel disliked for any or no reason.

   It works this way: At the low-end of blue-collar labor, dressed like cops and hardly conversant as peers to a workplace they’re assigned, Security Guards are often targets of jokes, derision and adversarial conflict by client workers, even expected at times to play court-jester.

    Client employees can then coerce the disposal of any guard who won’t play along, the guard leasing agency having to comply for the sake of the deal.

    Best called "Scapegoat Marketing", it uncovers as the Security Industry’s core business stratagem and root of its 100% to 300% annual employee turnover, the main reason society puts up with the antics of the trade.

    Potentializing their guards as easily dismissable, that is, by playing to a client’s fleeting triumph of superiority over a leased pseudo-authority figure - even to ridding one - makes the scapegoating of security guards a fun and easy game to play, as guards have few advocates and no recourse.

    This Scapegoat Marketing scheme compels talented security personnel to start from the bottom with every guard agency that will have them, working their way up, getting fired and often moving from town to town forever menial ... finding zero job security in the Security field.

The Police Mystique

    Security seems the only trade unrepresented by a unique insignia.

    Police Officers have Shiny Metal Badges; EMT’s their blue Star of Life insignia and Firefighters a Maltese Cross. Even Private Eyes were popularized by Pinkerton’s wide-eye logo and “We-Never-Sleep” motto until films reduced the genre to ridiculousness (6). Everyone identifies Red Cross, Red Crescent and even pawnshops by their comparative symbologies.

    In fact, every endeavor mankind invents seems to have it’s own identifying symbol or logo. But oddly, the Security Guard Industry never developed one of it’s own - fiddling aspirant civilian sentries into fuzzily noble ersatz police officers instead - by way of a police mystique portraying guards as cop sidekicks and guarding as a fast-track apprenticeship to cop-hood; absolute deceptions both.

    The protection industry has for so long traded on the police mystique that while legally cautioning new hirelings they are not cops, the wink-and-nod for Guards to swagger as cops in mannerism and jargon nevertheless oozes through.

    If you disbelieve me, talk at length to any Security boss and note the sublime arrogance underpinning the role-play. Ask local police officials how many guard company's badges, uniforms and private patrol cars try to resemble police styles.

    So it should be to the reader’s horror that badges as well as handcuffs and the like are readily available over the counter or by catalog to anyone desirous of being mistaken as an authority figure.

    While the better shops try to regulate purchase, handicaps of our free-market system belie the necessary licensing to obtain these accouterments, furthered by client insistence that guards’ gear-up in cop garb, believing criminals avoid properties flaunting the police look.

    But the criminal element isn’t fooled of course, only a naive public is. As countless crooks who have worked at Security can attest, guard jobs are often more façade than substance.

    They'll tell you that the common guard seldom performs actual protective duty but is assigned busy work when misperceived ‘standing around doing nothing’, and that clients often egotistically countermand the security they've hired.

    The police façade, it seems in the long run, is only a collective fantasy.

Cops Are Not Leaders

    No yearning amongst humans is greater than the wants to replicate oneself and to prove competency, the latter like a sense of humor few can admit to not having.

   Both find comfort in the ownership of a security guard agency though, similar to buying the magic mirror on the wall assuring its master he/she is magnificent and important.

    "A Guard Agency lets you play feudal lord by clothing knights of valor in cop-suits with your business logo! What a wonderful way to serve your fellow man …", and so on, the magic mirror tells them.

    It's why guard businesses come and go unabated, based on the police mystique allowing ex-cops and cop-wannabes to freelance police-buff hobbies abusing wage-slave security guards.

    Pivoting this study is one great in-your-face fact, the great central reality that COPS ARE NOT LEADERS; that federal, state and municipal police officers are work-a-day functionaries versed in the daily ritual of what Donald Trump might call, 'self-replicating bad management'.

    What I’m pointing out without dunning the few qualified in the field, is that scores of desperate ex-wonk cop-shop types seek Security helmsmanship as that ticket to finally being somebody important; finally able to justify pitiable careers by "doing things their way", e.g., ‘better’, and rarely succeeding.

    Resultantly, with the Security Industry acting as cops but as unregulated for competence as any other private enterprise - and with wonking bad management not yet a crime - Security companies as run by the aforementioned becomes, well, just more liability-prone business ventures, albeit ones that put your life in their hands.

   And since anyone just short a hardened felon can buy a business license, a bond and in some states a patrol operator’s permit, guard-leasing agencies can come-and-go like the strip-mall enterprises they are.

    Here I've roughly divided these enterprises into one of three basic though non-inclusive, noncollaborative commerces bent on buying your trust:

• Military (the Old-Boys Network) -- Low-profile, these careerists have excellent grasps on reality though operate in methods not well accepted by the general public. With niche contracts on military bases and in foreign venues, they succeed by collaborating confidential projects involving half the world’s intrigue. Unfortunately they can hide behind the taxable designation of "security" instead of what they don't want to admit they are: Private Armies.

• Police: (the self-aggrandized Hardened Professionals) --  Retired police officials and federal law enforcement administrators have dominated the security marketplace for decades - despite that Security is a marketable product and Law Enforcement not. A heavy-handed lack of finesse furthered by knee-jerk enforcement over prevention wonksmanship results in top-dog snobbery. If it's said that Police have no security training they’ll boastfully answer, ‘So what, we’re cops, and security is only common sense, right? So why change things??', they’ll likely tell you than ask you.

• Merchant: (our Societal Entrepreneurs) -- These are the Liberal Arts types with fawning "our guards are nice-we don’t carry guns-we’ll fetch your paper and make your coffee” approaches, sporting smiles, mission statements, charts, graphs and crisply pleated chinos. Alarm-system champions staffing ex-cops to enhance business clout, their spotless reputations are quickly ruined by loose cannon guards trailing bad habits from other agencies.

    One wil find that though poorly-knit and competitively wary due to lack of a central locus, e.g., no database to access guard or client credentials, the Security Community nevertheless parades itself as one big happy family with smothering claims of faultless services at low prices.

    But with basic security needs dictated by insurance regulators and quality service a thing of the past, clients need not bother comparison-shopping. They take what they can get.

The Common Sense Fiasco

    Pre-9/11, time-honored Security Chief chains-of-command redacted to have guards reporting to maintenance bosses. The police mystique exempted companies unable to afford real security professionals to put ex-or-retired cops on their boards instead. It was ineffective but made them look good.

    Après 9/11, media pundits proclaimed the private security industry a total scam and weren’t too pleased with police services either. Both the accused of course assured they were holding their ends up, though little procedurally changed save for first-responder 'don't-get-your-butt-blown-up' clinics for lack of any new ideas.

    As result, ex-cops still outnumber professional security managers in most venues, and I've watched them manage by popular culture, announcing decisions as whimsical edicts underlings are expected to miraculously enact.

    So with apologies to the American Society for Industrial Security’s excellent degree clinics for administrators, after all these years I still don’t see quality security programming trickling down to the distribution head.

    Instead, I see protection theory abandoned to the aforementioned lower echelon bad management ritual wonk force, where it chutes aloof to blue-collar supervisors for enactment.

    Generally promoted from the guard ranks with their collective ass on the line, blue-collar supervisors can't understand procedure but only warn workers to "do better", and evaluate their own leadership on the basis of: ‘anybody smarter than me is a threat.’

    Often highly neurotic, blue-collar supervisors generally revere, use as cover and wield as a weapon a nebulous concept - a survival technique - they believe is "common sense."    

    This common sense is not that sense common to the farm village in which one grew up, mind you, but is a mythological catchall concept popular amongst blue-collar workers that likens go-along-to-get-along as teamwork, and vilifies cleverness as antisocial.

    In another pivotal fact, as numerous and as much-needed as blue-collar supervisors are, they are the least educated of the corporate world and have the most to lose. We've all worked with them.

    Once eagerly promoted and hoping to make good, they slowly see their workplace as 'Mushroom Alley', where they are kept in the dark, fed s*** and sure to be canned in the end.

    This type of supervision tends to overthink simple instructions with presumptions bulwarking fears of inadequacy. And this is often where security goes wrong.

    It is where despite all top protocol in the form of instruction manuals, memos and training sessions, line managers in this business take for granted that - ‘since Security is just common sense, and since all people have the same common sense, and since those with badges are all-resourceful (and we know a badge confers higher IQ points on it's owner), then security guards with badges have the common sense to think their way through any kind of trouble’ - with the codicil, ‘unless they’re smarter than me, then they’re toast.’

    Now you’d be sure your company’s security isn't run presumptively like this, but take a really good look at it and chances are ... it is.

    And it's run like that because presumptive management is the easiest way to get through situations no one knows how to handle.

    Presumptive management is how most companies meet their customers and how chains-of-command conceal malfeasance, by hiding behind ill-trained low-paid revolving-door personnel who’s common sense can’t save them, and by expecting staff that has not drilled together to be team players.

    Bad for any business but unlikely to cease, presumptive management routines based on so-called common sense solutions are no longer good enough for your protection.

    And, such routines only establish low-end Security Guards - deployed as earnest, ersatz cops but without the proper training, credentialing and leadership to back up the masquerade - as inept if not dangerous to a modern society.

Facilitation vs. Enforcement

    Security means different things to different groups. An old military jape describes the misperceptions:

• The Navy ‘secures a building’ by turning off the lights and locking the doors.

• The Army ‘secures a building’ by occupying it so no one can enter.

• The Marines capture the building and set up defenses with suppressive fire and assault vehicles, establish reconnaissance and communications channels and prepare for close combat if the situation arises.

• The Air Force, on the other hand, takes out a three-year lease with an option to buy.  Ha, ha.

  
    So it is with the public, the corporate world, Security providers and the Police, each in turn with a private idea of how Security works; ideologies often at odds with another's...

    But to Ffolkestar, the definition is a simple one.

    Security is a stand-alone paradigm, a filtering aspect of the facilitation function which gets people through real or implied spheres of influence established against harm or loss.

    As such, Security is an intrinsic part of police, corporate and military action, but with none of these intrinsic to security.

    Security agents cannot enforce spheres of protection, it's only their job to finesse and facilitate protection through those spheres, whereas Law Enforcement - compulsory obedience to statute by government - in the strictest sense protects no one.

    Law Enforcement only sanctions personnel licensed by the judicial system to the processing of lawbreakers through that system … after protection has been breeched.

    Therefore, although Security and Law Enforcement are under our current civil defense structure each a force in support of the other, neither is networked in true merger. Instead, the two sloppily interlattice like schizophrenia, as not quite co-dependent but only with the appearance of conjunction.

    This means that Law Enforcers can remove evildoers from society whereas Security Facilitators can only legally deter (8).

    And since the aim of a modern security presence is to first deter and secondly entrap if not arrest, I feel that a guard-to-cop ratio of four-to-one is well worth interlacing into a new prototype of protection professionals to be called “security technospecialists”.

The Game of Trying

    Admittedly, this article is only one of many viewpoints calling for a revised security posture. It’s not as if Security regulation isn’t on the mind of our nation’s leaders.

    When I seriously began studying the genre in the early 1990's, California Representative Matthew Martinez was introducing House Resolution 1534, the ‘Private Security Officers Quality Assurance Act’. Its purpose was to require states to ensure the quality of private security services and the competence of private security officer personnel… as conditional to funding guidelines.

    Martinez’ spokesman later told me that Police Union lobbyists defeated the bill worrying that ‘professionalized security officers’ would replace cops in lower-echelon cop jobs, odd attitudes since it was happening anyway. He further lamented that private security associations wouldn’t agree on any unified codification of industry standards because each egotistically wanted to sponsor their version.

    Congress did eventually pass fractions of the Act in 1995 and 1996, and finally the ‘Private Security Officers Quality Assurance Act of 2001’ was legalized, this time under Georgia Congressman Bob Barr.

    That Act ...establishes an expedited procedure to obtain criminal record background checks through the FBI for security officers or alarm technicians, and directs the Attorney General to establish a [voluntary] system to use fingerprints provided by employers to determine whether prospective employees have criminal records before they are hired.

    For an act that finally taps into the remaining twenty-nine holdout states without formal competency standards, it’s certainly not enough (9). The post-9/11 era of the professionalized security officer is long upon us, but just isn’t crystallizing under a system recalcitrant to upgrading.

Real Training; Real Careers

    When collective bargaining enthusiasts rear up, I remind them that the subject of unionizing guards is indeed a sticky one, especially when unionized guards should not cross other union’s picket lines.

    Rightly, other than the anti-union-busting clause, no nationwide guard-specific union now exists or could thrive given the industries’ benefit-lacking menial wages and high turnover.

    However, guard collectives do selfishly subsist in metroplexes with AFL-CIO to umbrella personnel in outlandishly profitable security jobs elsewhere. Unfortunately other collectives dealing with guards class them with janitorial and maintenance staff, (10) which does not empower them.

    For security personnel to be truly effective on the ramparts they already stand, I propose that it’s time to finally de-menial-ize private security in the publics eye by raising Guards to the status of non-degreed professionals, and endowing them with career ladders to higher pay and opportunity.

    I envision the answer to this professionalization must start with a governmental mandate to oversee the registration and education of guards into credentialed, privately employed Security Technospecialists, through a Security Registry.

This mandate should --

   •  Devise a unified codification of standards for Privately Employed Security Guards and Officers, and their agencies, with a view to the creation of a new, specialized career field for same, acceptable to all fifty states.

   •  Write and implement a training classification review for said security employees, acceptable to all fifty states. This training shall combine Protectionist, Law Enforcement, Safety and Anti-Terrorist Detection Protocols. As the lowest security job itself is facilitative - that is, charged with civilian protection - leadership must be stressed at every level.

   •  Establish a fee-based credentialing system for registrants as modeled on these non-inclusive pay and skill categories -

   1. BASIC GUARD (night watchman, gate duty &c.)

   2. DESK GUARD (writing, clerical, computer skills &c.)

   3. DEFENSIVE GUARD ('Verbal judo', bodyguard, escort &c.)

   4. PUBLIC SAFETY OFFICER (First Aid, Fire, OSHA, Hazmat &c.)

   5. TACTICAL OFFICER (Offensive Weapons; lethal force &c.)

   6. PARAPOLICE Officer  -or- ‘Publicly Accredited Resource Auxiliary’  - a track to educate private protectors in combined security facilitation and law enforcement skills under a central command structure. Under license as America's police reservists, ParaPolice will supplement regional police in emergencies and satisfy Posse Comitatus by freeing National Guard troops for their original purpose (11). In relative peacetime, ParaPolice can be employed to patrol schools, airports and defense installations as private security agents, supplementarily serving as a renewable source of candidates from which small communities can choose entry-level police officers.

   7. MANAGEMENT AND DEFENSE SPECIALTIES (CI/CE disciplines &c.)

   •  Establish a national credential database of qualified graduates.

   •  Provision résumé and job-placement services for providers.

   •  Offer training programs through community colleges or by franchise to private academies.

      Examples of these recommended training modules are already in use by the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians, the private credentialing institute for first-aid responders and Paramedics, and the Peace Officer Standards Training [POST] system.

    The State of California’s POST, the one with which I’m most familiar, is administered through the State's community colleges. California's POST trains and certifies entry-level candidates for communities unable to underwrite police officer training, in effect allowing qualified graduates entry-level access to careers in Law Enforcement statewide. I find it an excellent example for a country-wide ParaPolice academy.

    However, although many current POST alumnae find work as Security Managers, they are not so much Security-oriented as obliged to the more-popular Law Enforcement mode, a detriment to their purpose. A national Security Registry will offer a combined standard.

    Cost efficiency is also beneficial of a Security Registry model, as Security agencies traditionally charge a nominal cover price for each contracted Guard no matter how the client utilizes that person.

    By rating pay commensurate to skill level, a team of thirty SR Technospecialists (TechSpecs) consisting of:

• Eight Category-1 Basic Officers,

• Ten Category-3 Defensive Officers,     

• Five Category-4 Safety Officers, and;

• Seven Category-6 ParaPolice Officers,

    ... offers a 20-25% savings over the use of thirty general-use guards while providing more comprehensive coverage.

Call to Action

    Unlike regular police, Security Guards are already on the forefront of our nation’s defenses, with their eyes everywhere. And the benefits to our economy by creating for them new careers in safety management are vast.

    Security Techspecs - who by self-improvement can seek, demand and create better jobs - will impart increased diligence to our businesses, industry and ports without sacrificing American freedoms.

    Security leasing agencies will happily accept a workforce that commands more money and delivers a superior product with the result of the rent-a-cop going the way of the Wild West vigilante.

    Supplementally, small communities will benefit from an influx of nationally credentialed Para-Police Officers trained in community policing, as true ‘minute-men’ legally deployable at a moment’s notice and very much deserving of their badges, handcuffs, keys and guns.

    And not to ruin things, if all a business needs is a regular night watchman, that employee will still be available at the old price.

    Guard registration and Para-Police will make the United States a stronger, safer place for generations to come. It is nothing more than a win-win solution to our nation’s security and policing needs.

Respectfully submitted,

R. W. Ffolkes

   Notes:

(1)  Hallcrest Report II, Private Security Trends; Page 150

(2) Author’s estimation based on widely differing statistics. It’s agreed that about a million-plus guards work for agencies that hold some form of liability licensing. Another quarter or more work freelance, that is to say, undocumented and unlicensed.

(3) "In-house” refers to guards hired directly by the businesses or municipalities who use them. In-house guards, usually called Security “Officers”, rarely receive security training and licensing, serving at the whim of management in a variety of security and non-security related roles. See above.

(4) U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: www.bls.gov/oco/ocos159.htm

(5) Excepting Alaska, California, Colorado and Nevada, who mandate overtime pay for all hours worked past 8-12 in a day, in addition to over 40 in a week.

(6) An excellent history of Pinkerton is found at -- http://www.crimelibrary.com/gangsters_outlaws/cops_others/pinkerton/1.html?sect=18

(7) Jailers and warders key rings often represent authority to the formerly institutionalized; many of whom publicly display multiple keys to assuage fears of societal victimization.

(8) Non-sworn private security personnel making an arrest as private citizens, do so as de-facto vigilantes and are not covered under the terms of their jobs or by client insurances for arrest making, technically making illegal any arrest by a contract employee on behalf of a client.

(9) Service Employees International Union statistic. www.SEIU.org

(10) Ibid. SEIU has dropped affiliation with the AFL-CIO.

(11) The Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C. § 1385): Use of Federal Troops for Law Enforcement Purpose.

Copyright © March 2009 Roger W. Ffolkes

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