Security officers' perspectives on training.

AuthorManzo, John
PositionReport

Introduction: Private security in the twenty-first century

Private security, including security personnel, is everywhere. In the United States, for example, Benson (1998) estimates that there are

two-and-a-half private security officers for every municipal police officer, a trend that Jones and Newburn (1999) note is increasing, in their study of the private security industries in the United States and the United Kingdom. Waard (1999) notes the same trend in several other European countries. Newburn (2001) ties this growth to an increase in privately owned environments and in the privatization in western societies of what had traditionally been public space. Williams and Johnstone (2000) further consider the growing presence of and reliance on closed-circuit television (CCT) in Britain as evidence of the increasing intrusion of private security into public realms. In Canada, Sanders (2005: 175) notes a 67% increase in employment in this sector between 1991 and 2001, before the obvious increase after 9/11.

Social scientific research on private security is, despite these trends, still scant compared to that on policing. Research has attended to the need for private security in various locations, to prescriptions as to how it should be handled (Benson 1998; Ferguson 1991), and, in the case of shopping mall security, to the need to have officers with whom customers can comfortably interact (Vellani 2000). However, the most popular area of social research into private security has not concerned the concrete practices of security officers or firms but rather the more theoretical "legal" aspects of private security. Especially problematized have been the challenges associated with the increased role in governance that private security firms and officers play in the modern public realm and the attendant issues involving the "accountability" of private security (see Johnston and Shearing 2003; Rigakos 2002; Shearing 1996; Shearing and Stenning 1987; Wood and Shearing 2007).

What is missing from much of this critically oriented research is attention to situated work practices, work strategies, and personal orientations to the practicalities of security as a lived activity. Studies have rarely focused on the views and discourses of officers themselves, with some exceptions, including research by Button (2003; 2007b), who has surveyed security guards concerning their workrelated understandings and the physical threats with which they contend, and Hobbs, Hadfield, and Winlow (2005), Monaghan (2002), and Rigakos (2008), who have studied the work of nightclub bouncers. However, the situated work practices and, in particular, the discourse of security officers are still under-researched, given the huge presence of private security in daily life; this lack of an emphasis on security officers' lived experience is especially notable, since there is a long history of work on police and policing that has made just this topic of situated work practices its focus. This research includes both classic and contemporary provocative ethnographies of "police on the street" by Barker (1999), Bittner (1967a; 1967b), Collison (1995), Manning (1997), Rubinstein (1973), Skolnick (1966), and Westley (1971), among others. There is, by comparison, little such research on the work of private security officers.

This paper is part of larger project that has entailed qualitative interviews of security officers in Canadian shopping malls, the goal of which has been to uncover the officers' understandings, narratives, and assessments of their work as security officers and of the role that they play in an increasingly privatized and commodified pseudo-public realm. The focus of this paper is on their recollections of their training and on the usefulness, in their views, of that training. Given this focus, it is first important to discern the state of training for security officers in the industry in general.

On "training"

In their foundational and influential Hallcrest Report II on private security trends, with recommendations, Cunningham, Strauchs, and Van Meter (1990: 312) reported that, despite improvements in the the-nextant regimens for private security training in the United States, the average security officer only received four to six hours of instruction prior to his or her first assignment. Walsh (1994) echoed this need for extensive training four years later. In 2004, Fischer and Green (2004: 90) reported that 25 US states required a formal training curriculum for private security officers. This percentage did represent an improvement for those who advocated more, and more standardized, training; in 1978, no US states had required training (Fischer and Green 2004: 40). The content of that training, however, varied greatly, depending on whether the officer was employed in a retail, office, airport, personal-service, or other setting.

In Canada, despite massive growth in the private security industry, there has not been a comparable increase in standardized training regimens (Button 2007a; Cukier, Quigley, and Susla 2003). Only in 2005 were bills introduced in the provincial legislatures of the country's two most populous provinces (Ontario and Quebec, which comprise nearly two thirds of the nation's population), and even with these new standards, the vast majority of security officers working now in Canada operate under a variety of standards and have experienced a wide range of training. Only British Columbia has a relatively long history of mandating provincially defined training standards.

Thus, 50% (perhaps more, as of this writing) of American states require a standardized training experience for security officers, and the majority of Canadians will, in the near future, be living in settings in which security officers receive rigorous and standardized training. However, even these figures may still occasion pessimism. If someone were told that "half" or "most," or "most, at some point in the future" of police officers would experience a standardized training curriculum, he or she would probably be scandalized. And as Button (2007a: 118) points out, even the most regulated North American states and provinces do not impose standards for training remotely as rigorous as the standards of nearly all European countries.

It may be the case that, even in unregulated jurisdictions, security officers are, seen objectively, "well trained." However, in the absence of explicit standards in many jurisdictions, the general public may have cause to question security officers' competence, a fact not lost in studies that have exposed the insults, disrespect, and even physical assaults accorded private security officers in many work locations (Button 2003; Manzo 2006). Perhaps one way to reduce the stigma of the security officer, in Canada and elsewhere, is to follow the suggestions of the Hallcrest Reports (Cunningham and Taylor 1985; Cunningham et al. 1990), Button (2007a), and others and to mandate more training; as Cukier et al. (2003: 257) note in a comparison of Canadian and European training regimens, Canada's are less rigorous with respect to training and also neglect issues of legal accountability, especially with respect to giving attention to how the increasingly police-like role of private security here might affect (and imperil) conformity with international human rights laws.

The unexamined question and an ethnomethodological proposal

What is absent among all of this research is any attention to whether security officers themselves consider their training to be adequate and whether they perceive their training to be useful in the actual conduct of their jobs. This paper examines those issues, inspecting officers' recollections of "training" and their reflections on the value of training in narratives concerning particularly challenging events that they encounter in their patrols. This is, thus, among the first studies to focus on officers' own articulated reflections on concrete occurrences and on the utility of training and other imported expertise in the course of their work.

The analytic goal of this article is not to interpret officers' discourse but rather to attempt to uncover the officers' own interpretations of their work experiences and the nature and place of "training" in and for those experiences. This focus on the talk and demonstrations of knowledge of research subjects as topics in their own right is a hallmark of ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967; Heritage 1984), a subfield of sociology that provides the theoretical underpinning for this investigation. Ethnomethodology is an approach to sociological inquiry that takes as its primary focus the means through which the "sense" that social life appears to have--its order, understandability, predictability, accountability, and so forth--is produced in the lived activities and efforts of the persons living it. Ethnomethodological studies pertaining to the sociology of law have a long history and include studies of the life-and work-worlds of police officers (Bailey and Bittner 1984; Bittner 1967a; 1967b), prisoners (Wieder 1974), jurors (Manzo 1996; Maynard and Manzo 1993), attorneys (Matoesian 1994; Maynard 1984), and practitioners in criminal justice and courtroom work more generally (Travers and Manzo 1997; Gilsinan 1982). In all cases, the focus of ethnomethodological inquiry is, first and foremost, what persons do in settings under study, and this paper brings precisely this grounded concern into focus to examine an aspect of security officers' work.

With respect to security officers, part of the way in which their tasks are made understandable and meaningful includes the ways in which they collaboratively and individually construct a vision of themselves. They do this in many ways, through their lived work practices generally and also through their talk about their work. The goal of this article is to uncover the officers' understandings of their work instead of...

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