7.2.3.3 Employing Private Security
People can take to employing private security, some of whom may be armed, if they distrust the ability of the police force to protect them.
Private security companies are widely used in South Africa, for example. A Christian Science Monitor article, Backstory: In South Africa, home sweet fortress, included this quotation:
“In South Africa, nothing says “Home Sweet Home” like 10-foot walls, electric fencing, burglar bars, and at least one panic button wired directly to an armed-response team, licensed to shoot, if not kill.”
Armed security guards are subject to the law, in the same way that the police are, but they may not have had the same level of training – so they put the public at risk. George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon Martin in the incident referred to earlier (7.2.3), was described as a “neighborhood watch captain” – highlighting the difference between an American armed watch and the British concept of neighbours being vigilant (7.2.3.1).
Vigilantes claim to be protecting a sector of society, but in practice they put many people at risk. The Kyle Rittenhouse case in November 2021 was contentious, for example:
“Conservatives hailed Rittenhouse as a hero for exercising his right to self-defense when he fatally shot two demonstrators and wounded a third who he said attacked him last year at a racial justice protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
…Rittenhouse’s decision, at age 17, to roam the streets of Kenosha toting a weapon in the name of protecting private property from rioters struck a particular nerve about just how far gun rights should extend.
“As the tragic events on that night in August showed, a 17-year-old arming himself with an AR-15 makes no one safer,” top officials at Giffords, the gun safety group, said in a statement.”
Militias are the most dangerous form of ‘self-service’ in policing. They can be the basis for intercommunal violence almost amounting to civil war. The Geneva International Centre for Justice described Militias in Iraq, for example, as “militia units, predominantly made of Shi’a voluntary fighters, who commit grave crimes on a purely sectarian basis, targeting especially the Sunni component of society”.
This page is intended to form part of Edition 4 of the Patterns of Power series of books. An archived copy of it is held at https://www.patternsofpower.org/edition04/7233a.htm.