[Infowarrior] - Schneier: Privatizing the police puts us at greater risk

Tue Feb 27 08:33:52 EST 2007

Last update: February 26, 2007  7:09 PM
http://www.startribune.com/562/story/1027072.html

Bruce Schneier: Privatizing the police puts us at greater risk
Abuses of power and brutality are likelier among private security guards.

Bruce Schneier
In Raleigh, N.C., employees of Capitol Special Police patrol apartment
buildings, a bowling alley and nightclubs, stopping suspicious people,
searching their cars and making arrests.

Sounds like a good thing, but Capitol Special Police isn't a police force at
all -- it's a for-profit security company hired by private property owners.

This isn't unique. Private security guards outnumber real police more than
5-1, and increasingly act like them.

They wear uniforms, carry weapons and drive lighted patrol cars on private
properties like banks and apartment complexes and in public areas like bus
stations and national monuments. Sometimes they operate as ordinary citizens
and can only make citizen's arrests, but in more and more states they're
being granted official police powers.

This trend should greatly concern citizens. Law enforcement should be a
government function, and privatizing it puts us all at risk.

Most obviously, there's the problem of agenda. Public police forces are
charged with protecting the citizens of the cities and towns over which they
have jurisdiction. Of course, there are instances of policemen overstepping
their bounds, but these are exceptions, and the police officers and
departments are ultimately responsible to the public.

Private police officers are different. They don't work for us; they work for
corporations. They're focused on the priorities of their employers or the
companies that hire them. They're less concerned with due process, public
safety and civil rights.

Also, many of the laws that protect us from police abuse do not apply to the
private sector. Constitutional safeguards that regulate police conduct,
interrogation and evidence collection do not apply to private individuals.
Information that is illegal for the government to collect about you can be
collected by commercial data brokers, then purchased by the police.

We've all seen policemen "reading people their rights" on television cop
shows. If you're detained by a private security guard, you don't have nearly
as many rights.

For example, a federal law known as Section 1983 allows you to sue for civil
rights violations by the police but not by private citizens. The Freedom of
Information Act allows us to learn what government law enforcement is doing,
but the law doesn't apply to private individuals and companies. In fact,
most of your civil right protections apply only to real police.

Training and regulation is another problem. Private security guards often
receive minimal training, if any. They don't graduate from police academies.
And while some states regulate these guard companies, others have no
regulations at all: anyone can put on a uniform and play policeman. Abuses
of power, brutality, and illegal behavior are much more common among private
security guards than real police.

A horrific example of this happened in South Carolina in 1995. Ricky
Coleman, an unlicensed and untrained Best Buy security guard with a violent
criminal record, choked a fraud suspect to death while another security
guard held him down.

This trend is larger than police. More and more of our nation's prisons are
being run by for-profit corporations. The IRS has started outsourcing some
back-tax collection to debt-collection companies that will take a percentage
of the money recovered as their fee. And there are about 20,000 private
police and military personnel in Iraq, working for the Defense Department.

Throughout most of history, specific people were charged by those in power
to keep the peace, collect taxes and wage wars. Corruption and incompetence
were the norm, and justice was scarce. It is for this very reason that,
since the 1600s, European governments have been built around a professional
civil service to both enforce the laws and protect rights.

Private security guards turn this bedrock principle of modern government on
its head. Whether it's FedEx policemen in Tennessee who can request search
warrants and make arrests; a privately funded surveillance helicopter in
Jackson, Miss., that can bypass constitutional restrictions on aerial
spying; or employees of Capitol Special Police in North Carolina who are
lobbying to expand their jurisdiction beyond the specific properties they
protect -- privately funded policemen are not protecting us or working in
our best interests.

Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and author of "Beyond Fear:
Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World."