Police: Private Police and Industrial Security

Despite great increases in the number of people employed in the private security industry, researchers know very little about what they do, how they do it, and what it means to the general public and the employees who come in contact with them. The popular culture clearly portrays an image that is not complimentary. Newspaper and magazines in the 1980s and early 1990s often described the lack of professionalism and inappropriate training among security officers.

While private policing involves more than just security officers, the public in general, and even students who major in criminal justice, only think of security officers when the term "private security" is uttered. Further, it is not uncommon for college students, both criminal justice and noncriminal justice majors, to describe security officers as "rent-a-cops," "toy cops," "unintelligent," "paid baby-sitters," and "overweight and unskilled." While both law enforcement and security professionals envision increased cooperation between the two groups in the future, security professionals have greater hope than public police for a relatively equal relationship.

The official society for security professionals, the American Society for Industrial Security (ASIS), has over twenty thousand members worldwide. In conjunction with some universities, the ASIS is working toward developing model course curriculum and program offerings. Many criminal justice programs in the United States offer course work or a concentration in security management as part of their programs. Some universities even offer degree programs in security. Security programs are typically housed in criminal justice departments and their course work is generally modeled after traditional law enforcement/police administration curricula. To make security education more relevant to academics and practitioners, changes in security curricula are needed in order to broaden its scope by incorporating methodology-based business and social science courses. ASIS membership has also supported programmatic and curricular changes, calling for the inclusion of social science and business-related courses in security education.