THE PRIVATE ARM OF THE LAW

Some Question the Granting of Police Power to Security Firms

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Kevin Watt crouched down to search the rusted
Cadillac he had stopped for cruising the parking lot of a Raleigh
apartment complex with a broken light. He pulled out two open Bud
Light cans, an empty Corona bottle, rolling papers, a knife, a
hammer, a stereo speaker, and a car radio with wires sprouting out.

"Who's this belong to, man?" Watt asked the six young Latino men he
had frisked and lined up behind the car. Five were too young to
drink. None had a driver's license. One had under his hooded sweat
shirt the tattoo of a Hispanic gang across his back.

A gang initiation, Watt thought.

With the sleeve patch on his black shirt, the 9mm gun on his hip and
the blue light on his patrol car, he looked like an ordinary police
officer as he stopped the car on a Friday night last month. Watt
works, though, for a business called Capitol Special Police. It is
one of dozens of private security companies given police powers by
the state of North Carolina -- and part of a pattern across the
United States in which public safety is shifting into private hands.

Private firms with outright police powers have been proliferating in
some places -- and trying to expand their terrain. The "company
police agencies," as businesses such as Capitol Special Police are
called here, are lobbying the state legislature to broaden their
jurisdiction, currently limited to the private property of those who
hire them, to adjacent streets. Elsewhere -- including wealthy gated
communities in South Florida and the Tri-Rail commuter trains between
Miami and West Palm Beach -- private security patrols without police
authority carry weapons, sometimes dress like SWAT teams and make
citizen's arrests.

Private security guards have outnumbered police officers since the
1980s, predating the heightened concern about security brought on by
the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. What is new is that police forces,
including the Durham Police Department here in North Carolina's
Research Triangle, are increasingly turning to private companies for
help. Moreover, private-sector security is expanding into spheres --
complex criminal investigations and patrols of downtown districts and
residential neighborhoods -- that used to be the province of law
enforcement agencies alone.

The more than 1 million contract security officers, and an equal
number of guards estimated to work directly for U.S. corporations,
dwarf the nearly 700,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the United
States. The enormous Wackenhut Corp. guards the Liberty Bell in
Philadelphia and screens visitors to the Statue of Liberty.

"You can see the public police becoming like the public health
system," said Thomas M. Seamon, a former deputy police commissioner
for Philadelphia who is president of Hallcrest Systems Inc., a
leading security consultant. "It's basically, the government provides
a certain base level. If you want more than that, you pay for it yourself."

The trend is triggering debate over whether the privatization of
public safety is wise. Some police and many security officials say
communities benefit from the extra eyes and ears. Yet civil
libertarians, academics, tenants rights organizations and even a
trade group that represents the nation's large security firms say
some private security officers are not adequately trained or
regulated. Ten states in the South and West do not regulate them at all.

Some warn, too, that the constitutional safeguards that cover police
questioning and searches do not apply in the private sector. In
Boston, tenants groups have complained that "special police," hired
by property managers to keep low-income apartment complexes orderly,
were overstepping their bounds, arresting young men who lived there
for trespassing.

In 2005, three of the private officers were charged with assault
after they approached a man talking on a cellphone outside his front
door. They asked for identification and, when he refused, followed
him inside and beat him in front of his wife and three children.

Lisa Thurau-Gray, director of the Juvenile Justice Center at Suffolk
University Law School in Boston, said private police "are focusing on
the priority of their employer, rather than the priority of public
safety and individual rights." But Boston police Sgt. Raymond Mosher,
who oversees licensing of special police, says such instances are rare.

Private police officers "do some tremendously good things," Mosher
said, recalling one who chased down a teenager running with a loaded gun.

In Durham, after shootings on city buses, the transit authority hired
Wackenhut Corp. police to work in the main terminal in tandem with
city police officers stationed on buses.

"There is a limit to the amount of law enforcement you can expect
taxpayers to support," said Ron Hodge, Durham's deputy police chief,
who said some of his requests for additional officers have been
turned down in recent years. Although, as in most cities, some Durham
police work privately while they are off-duty, Hodge said the demand
for off-duty police outstrips the supply.

In one of the country's most ambitious collaborations, the
Minneapolis Police Department three years ago started a project
called "SafeZone" with private security officers downtown, estimated
to outnumber the police there 13 to 1. Target Corp. and other local
companies paid for a wireless video camera system in downtown office
buildings that is shared with the police. The police department
created a shared radio frequency. So far, the department has trained
600 security officers on elements of an arrest, how to write incident
reports and how to testify in court.

When a bank was robbed in the fall, a police dispatcher broadcast the
suspect's description over the radio. Within five minutes, a security
officer spotted the man, bag of cash in hand, and helped arrest him.

Private police officers work across the Washington area, although
their numbers have not been growing sharply. According to the D.C.
police department, any private security employee who is armed must be
licensed as a "special police" officer with arrest powers; the city
has more than 4,000 of them, including at universities and some
hospitals. Maryland and Virginia, which have different criteria, each
have several hundred private police, according to law enforcement and
regulatory officials.

In Virginia, the Wintergreen Resort has a private police department
with 11 sworn officers. They include an investigator who last year
helped solve a string of break-ins along the Appalachian Trail,
identifying the burglar with images from the department's video
camera when he drove out of the resort with a stolen car.

The Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services is also trying
to foster closer ties between security companies without police
powers and the police and sheriff's departments. The agency has begun
training and certifying "Private Crime Prevention Practitioners" and
soon plans to send security companies e-mails with unclassified
homeland security threats and crime alerts.

Maryland has no similar collaboration, according to the Maryland
State Police, which licenses security officers. The District is
strengthening its supervision of security and private police, with
new requirements for training and background checks having been
adopted by the D.C. Council.

Some of the most sophisticated private security operations have
expanded in part because of shrinking local and federal resources.
The nation's largest bank, Bank of America, hired Chris Swecker as
its corporate security executive last year when he retired as
assistant director of the FBI. Even as identity theft and other fraud
schemes have been booming, Swecker said, fewer federal investigators
are devoted to solving such crimes, and many U.S. attorney's offices
will not prosecute them unless their value reaches $100,000.

As a result, he said, federal officials now ask the bank's own
investigators to do the work, including a three-year probe that
helped police and the FBI piece together an identity-theft ring that
defrauded 800 bank customers of $11 million.

In North Carolina, the state Department of Justice requires company
police to go through the same basic training as public officers. They
have full police powers on the property they are hired to protect.

Capitol Special Police's owner, Roy G. Taylor, was chief of three
small nearby police departments and held state law enforcement jobs
before starting the company in 2002. As Hispanic gangs were
increasing, he said, "I saw a niche." The company has eight officers,
some of whom are part time while working for area police departments.

They have used batons and pepper spray but have not fired a service
weapon, Taylor said. Once, in an apartment complex where they worked
in nearby Carrboro, Capt. Nicole Howard, Taylor's wife, dressed in
plain clothes to attract a convicted rapist who had been peering in
windows and stalking women. Then she arrested him for trespassing.

Today, charging $35 per hour, the firm has contracts with four
apartment complexes, a bowling alley, two shopping centers and a pair
of private nightclubs. A few weeks ago, two of the Taylors'
employees, Capt. Kenny Mangum and Officer Matt Saylors, walked over
to a car at the nightclub Black Tie to warn the men inside not to
loiter in the parking lot. Catching a whiff of marijuana, they found
seven rocks of crack cocaine in the ashtray and two handguns under
the seat of the driver, who was a convicted felon. They called the
Raleigh police to handle the arrest.

Because they are part of a private company, Taylor and his officers
are mindful that customers are billed for the time they spend
testifying in court.

"I try to make arrests only when absolutely necessary," said Watt,
the officer who stopped the six men with the open beer cans. The
company's marked patrol cars, he said, do not have radios to call for
backup help or computers to check immediately for outstanding
warrants or criminal records.

After satisfying himself that the six young men, lined up nervously
and shivering in the cold night air, had no drugs, Watt let them go.