June 2001 Volume 82 Number 6 "serving the protectors"
Private policing “the thin edge of the wedge”
by John Ballantyne

The proliferation of private security agencies is radically transforming policing in Australia, according to Federal Shadow Justice Minister, Duncan Kerr.

Speaking at the monthly Police Club luncheon in April, Kerr warned that this development “should be making everyone involved in law enforcement... stop to ask some very important questions.”

In most countries, including Australia, said Kerr, “the police are not the only, nor in many cases the prominent, provider of security to the community.”

He quoted Australian Bureau of Statistics figures which estimated that, by mid-1999, the number of private security industry employees in Australia had grown to almost three-quarters the number of sworn police officers.

Kerr expressed his “serious concerns about the emergence in Australia of ‘gated communities’ - fenced-off communities where residents have private roads, private communal space, and private security.”

He referred to a recent Sydney Morning Herald report (March 22) of a group of 20 Sydney hoteliers and retailers, led by developers of the new Waldorf Apartments, who have joined together to form the Chippendale Crime Control Committee.

He said: “The committee has hired a private security firm to carry out foot patrols between 4pm and 4am weekdays, and 24 hours on weekends. Residents have been offered the service for free.

“The Waldorf Apartments management sees heroin dealing as to blame for house break-ins, bag snatches and muggings in the area. And these activities are threatening the ability of the Waldorf to attract guests. They want to see their residents protected.”

Kerr observed that the group has gone well beyond merely hiring private security. “It has also undertaken community activities - meeting with elders of the Aboriginal community (and) supplying equipment to the local soccer team,” he said.

However, Kerr cautioned that this private policing initiative may be self-defeating.

“The residents,” he said, “have at least one pertinent concern - they fear that if the patrol results in a fall-off in crime complaints to the police, this will be used as justification for the closure of the Redfern police station.”

Kerr added that the issue of private patrols prompted “other, more universal questions which must be asked and answered”, such as where precisely private policing should fit into the criminal justice system and whether its priorities and actions should be determined solely by those who could afford to pay.

“What will happen,” asked Kerr, “when groups such as the Chippendale Crime Control Committee, or residents of gated communities, start insisting that, since they don’t use the public police system, they should no longer have to pay to support the public police system - as is starting to happen in the United States?”

Private policing, he said, was “a growing phenomenon” which could not be ignored. But Kerr warned that the public should not “placidly accept the encroachment of private agencies into all aspects of law enforcement”.

He stressed two major causes for public concern. “The first is accountability,” he said. “Public policing is under constant public scrutiny... By contrast, there are few processes of accountability for misuse in private police bodies.

“The second is inequality. If policing becomes a residual service, provided only where private individuals and corporations can not afford their own protection services, public policing soon will cease to be funded adequately and the least well-off in our community will again suffer.”

Kerr said that it is no longer private organizations which are paying for private policing; government bodies in Australia are also increasingly looking to private provision of security.

He observed that, already, in South Australia local governments have considered contracting private agencies “to carry out one of the traditionally core functions of the police - street patrols.”

At the national level, he said, the Howard government has recently rewritten the Fraud Control Policy of the Commonwealth, with the explicit intention of allowing “Commonwealth departments to contract out fraud control responsibilities to the private sector.”

These developments, said Kerr, “should be making everyone in law enforcement - police, governments, policy-makers - stop to ask some very important questions.”

“Security and policing controlled by the rich (are) not accountable to government...”

Kerr warned that private policing should not occur “without any involvement or control by the state.”

“We do not want to become a country like America,” he said, “where in many cities security for sale means that those who cannot afford it cannot have it.

“Security and policing controlled by the rich (are) not accountable to government, and (this) is not democratic. The people who need policing the most are, ironically, the ones who can afford it the least.”

It was important, said Kerr, for people involved in law enforcement to take the initiative and “form well-developed, defensible answers and policy positions.” If they did not, he warned, “others will. Or no-one will, and developments will continue, unattended.”

By way of illustration, he drew attention to some current thinking circulating in academic circles, both in Australia and overseas.

He discussed a radical proposal of Australian National University’s Professor John Braithwaite and UK Professor Clifford Shearing to abolish the police budget in favour of a “contestable policing budget”. Under this scheme, public police would no longer have exclusive rights to taxpayers’ money allocated to policing, but instead would have to compete with private firms to provide law-enforcement services to the public.

Kerr conceded that the Braithwaite/Shearing proposals at least had the virtue of bringing private policing under some sort of government overview and regulation. But he warned that “contestable policing budgets” would be “the thin edge of the wedge towards the residualization of public policing.”

“If public policing is weakened, our democracy is weakened,” he insisted.

“Police officers do not patrol a street, respond to an emergency call, or investigate a crime, because they are paid lots of money to by any one individual. Police officers are public servants in the truest sense of the word.”

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