A high or increasing fraction of guard labor [1] doesn't bode well for an economy or a society. It's a sign that there may be an increasing amount of defection vs cooperation in a society, either more people where the marginal calculus has tipped, or the existing defectors are working harder.
It was routine for homeowners to hire armed nightwatchmen. In Nigeria, we had a Touareg guy, with a scimitar. In Morocco, our neighbor had guys with machine guns (which meant we didn’t need much more than a wall), but we lived in a nice area. Our neighbor had some relation to the King. In Uganda, our watchman had a staff (and a holstered pistol).
South Africa has so much crime, that even the poorest neighborhoods have broken-glass walls.
The average African country is severely underpoliced. Like, severely, in a way most Westerners can't wrap their heads around. Even though Nigeria claims to have 400k cops, I'm willing to bet at least 100k to 200k are ghost officers. Just like when ISIS started their 2014 offensive and the Iraqi gov. admitted half of their army existed on paper.
And, I'm not the one saying it. Nigeria routinely purges thousands of ghost officers from salary rosters and recently claimed it had 80k ghost cops. In a country of 200 million. So, it's a no-brainer why private security is a better deal once you have the means. They're available 24/7 and often have guns, and backup, and other tech.
Similar story when I visited Nairobi with my then-partner: stayed in a fenced compound with guards; and when we visited my partner's friend, on the bus to her place we passed a supermarket which was guarded by someone holding a light machine gun.
We visited somebody in Nairobi. She picked us up at the airport. On the way into her apartment complex, she had to stop her car while the guards ran mirrors under the car to check for bombs.
We had some good family friends retire to a decent village in Costa Rica and they learned quickly that broken-glass walls were their best defense against thieves.
Police clearance rates of reported crimes have tanked in almost every category of crime. [1] Property crime saw a 30% reduction in clearance rates (17%->12%) from 2019-2022 despite funding/staffing staying flat or going up and crime rates/reporting rates going down.*
The marginal calculus could be tipping, but imo less from issues of social cohesion and more from an abdication of enforcement that necessitates more guard labor in the form of private security.
Another partial explanation is just that retail orgs are overreacting and/or cynically crafting a narrative to explain poor business decisions or changing economic conditions.[2][3][4]
> “Maybe we cried too much last year” about merchandise losses, Walgreens finance chief James Kehoe acknowledged Thursday on an earnings call.
> “Probably we put in too much, and we might step back a little bit from that,” he said of security staffing.
> However, it’s not clear the numbers add up. For example, data released by the San Francisco Police Department does not support the explanation Walgreens gave that it was closing five stores because of organized retail theft, the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2021. One of the shuttered stores that closed had only seven reported shoplifting incidents in 2021 and a total of 23 since 2018, according to the newspaper. Overall, the five stores that closed had fewer than two recorded shoplifting incidents a month on average since 2018.
> The National Retail Federation had said that nearly half of the industry’s $94.5 billion in missing merchandise in 2021 was the result of organized theft. It was likely closer to 5 percent, experts say.
Econ or Bloomberg had an article about a month or two ago about stores locking up their merch and the motivations for it, and why it's such a stupid idea (sales plummet when you need an employee to unlock deoderant). One of the reasons for locking everything up is that they don't have good inventory management systems and when a manager or higher level person sees empty shelves they assume theft...but often times it either hasn't been ordered or simply hasn't been put on the shelves. Most real theft happens from the trucks delivering the goods.
I've read a lot of articles saying that the real problem with theft is from employees.
That might be true but it certainly hasn't made me feel good about watching people walk out with a big jug of wine, electronics, a case of toilet paper, etc. That last one provoked some curiosity - are their circumstances so bad that it's worth risking jail time or are there so little consequences that it's the equivalent of self check-out?
Isn't guard labor in the US either decreasing or staying flat?
I mean, the entire reason Allied Universal exists is because security (and therefore "guard labor") IS NOT a growth industry. A stable or declining industry inevitably leads to consolidation of the type that formed Allied Universal.
Unrelated but that Wikipedia page seems to be a bit biased. What has capitalism specifically got to do with guard labor? Do communist and socialist societies not need guards, prisons and militaries?
In any case in communism majority of theft was committed by the workers themselves, so any guards would likely be in on it anyway.
The real economic system and its currency at the same time was the massive web of connections and favours. How does one guard that?
My grandfather, who was a surgeon, was reportedly particularly good at obtaining scarce goods like toilet paper - most likely as a token of gratitude for the procedures he performed.
In the USSR, stealing from work was so normalized that it wasn't even called stealing. It was just "carrying out". Jobs in restaurants and meat packing plants were highly desirable not for the wages but for how much food you could steal.
Capitalism is a system that tries to enforce collaboration between anonymous people and entities, without central planning. But what happens when that doesn’t work? Is it the government or private industry that fills the gaps?
Friedrich Hayek wrote on the topic of defending private property as a right to assert control [1]. To me, this feels particularly prevalent in high capitalist societies like the US, where the bond between people is not shared tradition, culture, and values - but rather personal freedom.
Or reducing traffic deaths from dangerous driving with a financial deterrent
Did you know that during GWOT, US military personnel deployed to combat zones were more likely to be killed in a car accident after returning home than they were to be actually killed in combat?
Cops being abusive pigs doesn’t invalidate the logic behind the law, but then again it always has been the uneven enforcement that’s the problem
IMO traffic enforcement is convenient busywork to keep cops occupied until capital needs them for something specific. As a bonus, it generates lots of interactions with the public that they can choose to turn violent if they want to let off some steam, and so keeps a persistent note of terror playing.
I figure it's both. There are 10 gorillion cops and municipalities. Some likely have policies and staff that get along well with the public and just try to administrate traffic in a safe and fair way. Some treat it as a cash cow and care more about the revenue stream than increase or decrease in harm. It's one of those things where both sides of the argument can be true in specific cases, making it perfect "internet debate" fodder.
“Nothing in the language of the due process clause itself requires the state to protect the life, liberty and property of its citizens against invasion by private actors.”
From the article, quoting the Supreme Court. I’ll admit that the police may still have a “duty” (whatever that is defined as), but it is certainly true that they aren’t required to protect the public
The central organizing principle of US society is individual freedom, which causes the crime rate to be high, so you need a high proportion of guards (sensu lato) to combat that.
In countries where the clan is the organizing principle, in contrast, your family members act as a check on your behavior, but those family members do not count as guards. (If you live in the US, your family has less influence on you because you need them less.)
There is a low level of guard labor that needs to happen in a free society, that's true, but it shouldn't be _increasing_ as a percentage, and it's not a good sign for the health of society at large if it is.
Cooperation _isn't_ the natural state of people, and we need to make sure we're increasing the benefits of working together and not just the punishments for crime. Right now, the benefits of the economy are accruing disproportionately to the wealthiest and we need to do something about that, because we're destroying the motivation for people at the bottom rungs to "play nice".
I was a security guard for a professional hockey team facility when I first moved to the big city to meet people and have something to do. I only booked shifts for games and concerts I wanted to watch, but couldn't afford or would never buy. I was terrible at my job and put in less than minimum efforts (think: didn't check tickets and never learned the layout of the arena).Instead of quiting I just stopped going to work. Even this version of "security guard" absolutely sucked.
I worked as an event security guard at the Moscone Center in SF ~10 years ago. If you’re not familiar with the location, it was (at the time, may still be) the main convention center in San Francisco, a few blocks from Market Street downtown. It’s not a particularly rough area, but it’s close to some hot spots like the Tenderloin and Fulsom Street. The center is actually a complex of three buildings, the larger of the two connected via an underground pedestrian walkway, with adjoining staff-only underground tunnels and loading docks. The third building stands alone and isn’t connected to the others, but is on the same intersection across the street from one building and kitty-corner from the other one. Wondercon was held there, and Apple used to hold WWDC at the standalone building (though they brought their own event security, opting not to use the company I worked with).
The job was mostly consistent with this article, which was well-written and humanizing for the workers, if not necessarily endearing them to us.
I’m glad I had the experience. I got to see a lot of niche trade shows and conventions from setup to tear down which I never would have thought to attend otherwise, as well as see how lading workers made it all happen behind the scenes.
One time I arrived at what I thought was to be a normal shift at a women’s leadership conference to be pulled aside by my boss, who told me in unambiguous terms that the First Lady would be dropping by for a speech, and I would be working a door opposite an eminently large and in charge Secret Service agent, who I’ll charitably say didn’t need me but as I was one of a only a few of my company’s event security for that particular event, we essentially acted as liaisons between the event/house security and the public. Beyond that point was authorized access only, which did not include our staff, as we were not necessary.
Another notable incident involved a conference for the American Psychiatric Association, protesters from the Church of Scientology, and actual, literal, capital-A Anonymous counter-protesters in Guy Fawkes masks.
It was just the CoS at first, and then someone must have said something on Twitter or something, because suddenly there was a flash mob of CoS outnumbered by Anons roughly 2:1, with around 50-75 participants if I had to guess. All while we have a strait-laced normie psych con going on.
We had to lockdown the center, locking all exterior public entry doors, move badge checks outside temporarily, and threw up some barricades at the sidewalk to provide a buffer zone between the sidewalk and the center entrance. The whole thing probably lasted a couple hours or less, but it was probably the most San Francisco thing I experienced at that particular job.
I even asked Aubrey Cottle about it when he did a Reddit AMA, and he seemed to be a least familiar with the occurrence:
in 2010, i did a study abroad semester in moscow and was confused by all the armed security in grocery stores, standing around, doing nothing. i only later connected the dots from the recent breakdown of social order in the 1990s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSrQe9J8Cv8 is a contemporary far-past artistic take on it, the chorus is roughly "in the nineties, they killed people, and ran around naked and mad")
rather strange trip to see the same arrive in the us
security guards deal with the worst aspects of the pubilc in a low status role, there is a lot of irony in the writer expressing sympathy for the people creating nuissances the guards are tasked with managing, but not for the people whose job is to deal with the problems that are beneath even police and vaunted "health professionals." private security is a huge growth market precisely because of the attitudes and beliefs encompassed by Harpers' writers and readership.
I was glad to read that the author had to do some walking as part of the job as it sounded like he would have benefited from the exercise, yet even that didn't seem to soften his aspirational contempt for people who do physical work.
The one thing I would advocate for in the private security business would be fitness standards as that sets a bar for some basic competence that would add a dynamic with more dignity and respect in the role. Even though I would agree the whole job is the living symbol of policy failures and naive sentimental politics, if there's a bet to make on growth, managing the consequences of those failures seems like an unlimited opportunity.
Getting paid minimum wage to wander around an empty building will not become a status job no matter how many sit-ups you do. Training standards would help. Paying real wages would help more.
> Gallup’s most recent annual crime survey found that 40 percent of Americans are afraid to walk alone at night near their homes, the figure marking a thirty-year high that runs counter to plunging violent-crime rates.
ugh. spurious reasoning
When areas or situations are unsafe people must make compensating behaviors to protect themselves because nothing else will protect them. They don't go out at night, they don't go out alone, they avoid looking like they have valuables, they especially don't go out at night alone with valuables while being a woman. They take longer routes to avoid worse places, they don't make eye contact. They carry weapons. They change to the other side of the street.
The effect of these compensating behaviors is that the recorded rates of crime go down and can continue to drop even as the level of safety and imposition on people's lives goes up. In that case they're not more safe, they're less, but they're not relying on the people whos crime stats we look to for as much protection as they did... which brings me to:
Another reason drawing this connection can be fallacious is because in areas of persistently high crime people don't report it because law enforcement will not do anything about it (or won't even take a report). Exceptional events are worth reporting but when a kind of crime is common it's not an exception, reporting is just a waste of time for everyone involved. Again, reported crime can go down while crime is going up.
Yet another reason why these figures can be misleading is because the nature of the crimes can change. In one location most shootings may at one point have been drug dealers shooting each other in turf wars, but later they begin shooting uninvolved residents as part of robberies. While its terrible that anyone is getting shot, criminals shooting each other is rightfully less of a concern because it has the obvious personal mitigation of not being involved in the illicit drug trade (for this example...). So yet another reason why you can hear from people that they are less safe even when the stats say crime is decreasing-- essentially simpsons paradox: the way you aggregate or disaggreate data can swap the direction of a trend. No person experiences the population's crime rate, each person experiences their own crime rate.
And sure there are also plenty of effects in the other direction too-- the 24 hour news cycle, open records laws, social media feeds, ubiqitous cameras-- all making some people feel like they're in the middle of a warzone even when they're perfectly safe. But the existence of biases in one direction doesn't make the other not exist. And for some people and places the net bias may be one way while for other people and places its another.
> Another reason drawing this connection can be fallacious is because in areas of persistently high crime people don't report it because law enforcement will not do anything about it (or won't even take a report). Exceptional events are worth reporting but when a kind of crime is common it's not an exception, reporting is just a waste of time for everyone involved. Again, reported crime can go down while crime is going up.
This theory can't explain the plunge in violent crime rates, as the plunge exists even in the National Crime Victimization Survey, which directly asks survey respondents if they have been the victim of a crime. The annual rate of violent victimization has dropped from 80 per 1000 in the early 1990s to about 20 per 1000 now. https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cv22.pdf
Your point about "compensating behaviors" is plausible, but doesn't explain the similar drop in property crime (burglary, motor vehicle theft, etc.), for which there are fewer compensating behaviors that could work.
The decline in crime since the early 1990s is actually a major area of study for criminologists, because there is no easy explanation for it. All categories have decline, however they are measured, and in 30 years the field has not come up with an explanation that can account for all the observed facts.
> The decline in crime since the early 1990s is actually a major area of study for criminologists, because there is no easy explanation for it. All categories have decline, however they are measured, and in 30 years the field has not come up with an explanation that can account for all the observed facts.
The lead-crime hypothesis has the advantage over many other theories that it explains the global drop in crime, not just that in a particular nation or municipality.
This might be a "read the paper dipshit" moment, but I'm not certain that the "have you been a victim of a crime" is a sufficient question. Would someone who lives in an area where there's an expectation that your car will be broken into consider themselves a victim of crime? I was just reading about domestic violence within same sex couples and in many cases victims don't consider themselves as such because of a belief that DV can only affect hetero women. I wonder if something similar could be going on here for some proportion of the respondents.
As you might expect from something called the National Crime Victimization Survey, it's quite detailed. Initial interviews are conducted in-person. There's a screening questionnaire that asks extensively about a bunch of specific kinds of crime: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/ncvs22_bsq.pdf
For instance, for theft, respondents are asked separately about 8 different categories of things that might have been stolen.
To account for memory problems with dates (people are bad at remembering how long ago something happened), respondents have follow-up interviews every six months to ask about events that happened in between interviews, so the results can be compared to their previous survey six months ago.
Are you actually saying: "it is more dangerous out there than it used to be, which makes people stay inside, which makes crime rates lower than they used to be"? If that's true, how would the world look different if we were all mostly safer but there was just a general strain of fear and paranoia running through society (ie the scenario that the article argues for).
The "people stay inside, which makes crime rates lower" doesn't make sense. A mugger out to make some cash is going to hit SOMEONE, whether there are 2 or 20 people out walking in a town.
Staying in may increase your personal safety but won't decrease the crime rate. In fact in a "prisoner's dilemma" kind of way it probably makes the empty streets more dangerous.
In the article's world, crime happens and is publicized but is trending down or is a relatively rare event that's just played up by news organizations for money. In OP's world, crime happens and is largely unreported save for the most extreme examples. I think the reality is somewhere in the middle, there are a lot of places where "petty" property crime is considered a complete non-event and in those areas the crime rate has dropped because the police simply don't take reports and there's a stigma associated with going to the police because you "just" had you car broken into or were "only" mugged for $40. The flipside to this is that mass casualty events like terrorist attacks and mass shootings are extremely rare, but because of the money in reporting on them and political capital that can be gained fear mongering, they end up widely known and feared within their target demographics.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_Universal