NCJ Number
177859
Journal
UCLA Law Review Volume: 46 Issue: 4 Dated: April 1999 Pages: 1165-1287
Date Published
1999
Length
123 pages
Annotation
This article describes what is known and unknown about the private security industry, traces the industry's history, assesses the challenges and opportunities it creates for judges and scholars, and provides an agenda for future research and doctrinal development.
Abstract
Part I discusses what every scholar of criminal procedure or constitutional law needs to know about today's private police: who they are, what they do, the rules that govern them, and the broad questions they present. Part II presents the history of private policing, which is entwined with the history of public law enforcement. Part II concludes by drawing provisional lessons from the history of policing about the causes of the recent expansion of private security, the considerable but finite malleability in the forms and conceptions of policing, and the limits of legal rules in structuring the police as a social institution. Part II identifies and discusses the unresolved dilemmas private policing creates for the state-action doctrine in criminal procedure. The article argues, however, that police privatization raises challenges more important than determining whether to view security guards as state actors. Part IV addresses two of these challenges. The first is to learn more about the dimensions of the private police and about how they operate. This information is necessary for a sensible assessment of the rules that govern private security personnel and could help test any number of proposals for reforming public law enforcement. The second challenge is to reconsider whether the state owes all its citizens some minimally adequate level of police protection. 653 footnotes