Author: Mark Button
ISBN No: 0 7546 4797 8
Review date: 13/12/2025
No of pages: 205
Publisher: Ashgate
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
Occupied with officers: Mark Button previewed his latest book in our December issue. Here’s our review.
In his December article, Mark Button – lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, one of a growing number of unis offering security and risk management courses – made the point that there are few books that take seriously the occupational culture of security officers. There was Selling Security: The private policing of public space, by Alison Wakefield, reviewed in our December 2003 issue. Button has studied guard forces at a leisure complex and a defence manufacturer. In academic fashion he terms them ‘Pleasure Southquay’ (my guess, it’s Gunwharf Quays at Portsmouth Harbour) and ‘Armed Industries’. At the heart of the book are the legal tools of an officer – not only the law, but whether to use common sense or coercion. He suggests that security officers are more confident about using legal powers (such as to arrest, or search) if they use them regularly, or never. Once Dr Button’s study is peppered with insights from interviews – far from security being second to police, police may call on a female security officer, say, to search a woman shoplifter if there is no policewoman; and in a football-hooligan ‘riot’ security and police back one another. At ‘Southquay’, as Button says, the contract security is by a top-ten BSIA member, whereas the defence firm contract guarding replaced a works police. As for whether security officers want more powers (or non-lethal weapons), Button found officers knowing well that they are not police. A torch, carried to use like a truncheon in an emergency, means many staff are in fact armed, Button suggested. Assuming Button did study Gunwharf Quays, I can confirm that the aim is to be welcoming to visitors; yet the night-time economy begets drunks and violence. Profit and protection, then, in tension. In other words, as Button puts it: “Security officers often lead a schizophrenic existence serving several masters with differing agendas and having to please them all.” Another dilemma was thrown up at the defence site, ‘a prohibited place under the Official Secrets Act’. Security staff searched vehicles, but only went through the motions. How then, do you get committed staff to do a thorough job (bearing in mind that the works police had been paid far better with fewer hours)? In a fast-changing world, if photography is banned from your site, how do you handle camera-phones? As the two case studies show, there is a world of difference between the ‘watchman’, the officer looking to retirement; and the ‘parapolice’, the white male able to tell customers to put down that beer bottle, don’t urinate, and so on.
In-house ‘folly’
This book will tell many in guarding what they already know: still some absurdly long working weeks by ‘floaters’, uniforms no good for winter outdoors, guard contractors saying one thing about training and doing another. Button throws some punches at the end: exempting in-house officers from SIA licences is a ‘significant folly’,he writes. Button has done the wider world a service (and hence private security too) by showing the sometimes lonely and hazardous work of an officer, and how they can, if asked, give a lot back to their client. As one officer told Button: “We are on the ground and know how it is.”
