[Infowarrior] - The Private Arm of the Law

[Richard Forno]

The Private Arm of the Law
    By Amy Goldstein
    The Washington Post

    Tuesday 02 January 2007

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010207S.shtml

    Some question the granting of police power to security firms.

    Raleigh, North Carolina - 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.

    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."

    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 police officers "do some tremendously good things," Mosher said,
recalling one who chased down a teenager running with a loaded gun.

    In Durham, after shootings on city buses, the transit authority hired
Wackenhut Corp. police to work in the main terminal in tandem with city
police officers stationed on buses.

    "There is a limit to the amount of law enforcement you can expect
taxpayers to support," said Ron Hodge, Durham's deputy police chief, who
said some of his requests for additional officers have been turned down in
recent years. Although, as in most cities, some Durham police work privately
while they are off-duty, Hodge said the demand for off-duty police outstrips
the supply.

    In one of the country's most ambitious collaborations, the Minneapolis
Police Department three years ago started a project called "SafeZone" with
private security officers downtown, estimated to outnumber the police there
13 to 1. Target Corp. and other local companies paid for a wireless video
camera system in downtown office buildings that is shared with the police.
The police department created a shared radio frequency. So far, the
department has trained 600 security officers on elements of an arrest, how
to write incident reports and how to testify in court.

    When a bank was robbed in the fall, a police dispatcher broadcast the
suspect's description over the radio. Within five minutes, a security
officer spotted the man, bag of cash in hand, and helped arrest him.

    Private police officers work across the Washington area, although their
numbers have not been growing sharply. According to the D.C. police
department, any private security employee who is armed must be licensed as a
"special police" officer with arrest powers; the city has more than 4,000 of
them, including at universities and some hospitals. Maryland and Virginia,
which have different criteria, each have several hundred private police,
according to law enforcement and regulatory officials.

    In Virginia, the Wintergreen Resort has a private police department with
11 sworn officers. They include an investigator who last year helped solve a
string of break-ins along the Appalachian Trail, identifying the burglar
with images from the department's video camera when he drove out of the
resort with a stolen car.

    The Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services is also trying to
foster closer ties between security companies without police powers and the
police and sheriff's departments. The agency has begun training and
certifying "Private Crime Prevention Practitioners" and soon plans to send
security companies e-mails with unclassified homeland security threats and
crime alerts.

    Maryland has no similar collaboration, according to the Maryland State
Police, which licenses security officers. The District is strengthening its
supervision of security and private police, with new requirements for
training and background checks having been adopted by the D.C. Council.

    Some of the most sophisticated private security operations have expanded
in part because of shrinking local and federal resources. The nation's
largest bank, Bank of America, hired Chris Swecker as its corporate security
executive last year when he retired as assistant director of the FBI. Even
as identity theft and other fraud schemes have been booming, Swecker said,
fewer federal investigators are devoted to solving such crimes, and many
U.S. attorney's offices will not prosecute them unless their value reaches
$100,000.

    As a result, he said, federal officials now ask the bank's own
investigators to do the work, including a three-year probe that helped
police and the FBI piece together an identity-theft ring that defrauded 800
bank customers of $11 million.

    In North Carolina, the state Department of Justice requires company
police to go through the same basic training as public officers. They have
full police powers on the property they are hired to protect.

    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.

    "I try to make arrests only when absolutely necessary," said Watt, the
officer who stopped the six men with the open beer cans. The company's
marked patrol cars, he said, do not have radios to call for backup help or
computers to check immediately for outstanding warrants or criminal records.

    After satisfying himself that the six young men, lined up nervously and
shivering in the cold night air, had no drugs, Watt let them go.