BADGE OF DISHONOUR?
How do we handle misbehaving guards
Last September, Bert Skeete decided to visit West Edmonton Mall. The Mississauga, Ont., resident was vacationing in Edmonton and planned to explore the famous shopping centre on one of his afternoons in the city. But instead of leaving with shopping bags, the 79-year-old was lifted up and carried from the property by two mall security guards who he says misidentified him as a shoplifter.
Skeete, a former security guard himself, was so upset by how the guards treated him that he left Edmonton the next day, cutting his visit short.
“I was hurt I was treated the way I was,” he said. “What they were trying to investigate had nothing at all to do with me.”
Skeete is one of several people in the past few years to go public with complaints about the conduct of Alberta security guards.
The complaints come during a time of rapid growth in Alberta’s private security sector. In 2007, there were around 6,000 licensed private security guards in Alberta. There are now more than 24,000 security professionals of all types licensed to work in the province, according to provincial statistics.
That number is set to grow. Earlier this year Alberta’s justice ministry announced plans to speed up the licensing system to make it easier for Albertans to get certified for security work. The legal cannabis industry will need even more private security guards, industry officials say — some of whom might even be armed.
Increasing the number of private security guards in businesses and on city streets has in some cases been shown to reduce crime and disorder. Private security has public benefits, such as freeing up police to respond to more serious crime.
But has Alberta’s system to oversee security guards — who have the power to arrest, search, handcuff people and use batons — kept pace? A shortage of statistics makes it hard to say whether complaints about profiling and excessive force are one-offs or part of a larger trend.
CANADA’S PRIVATE SECURITY SURGE
More people are employed worldwide as private security guards than as police officers, according to a 2015 Public Safety Canada study.
Glen Kitteringham, a 28-year security industry veteran with Calgary-based KSG Consulting, said private security regularly deals with lower-level issues that in the past might have been dealt with by police — whose numbers in many cases haven’t kept pace with population growth.
Part of the reason for the increase in licensed guards is that many did not require licences prior to 2007, when the Progressive Conservative government updated the 40-year-old Private Investigators and Security Guards Act. Alberta’s population has also surged during recent oil booms, and many work camps and industrial sites have a private security presence.
Another reason is the rise in “mass private properties” like shopping malls, airports and commercial buildings, and the accompanying expectation that private industry bear the costs of securing those facilities.
Still another reason is Western society’s shrinking appetite for risk, said Kitteringham.
“Organizations and institutions are looking to cut their risk as much as possible, and one way they’re doing that is through increasing (their) security program and security departments,” he said.
In the U.S., the private security industry’s rise coincided with a sustained drop in violent crime. In his book Uneasy Peace, U.S. sociologist Patrick Sharkey writes that private security played at least a small role in that “great crime decline.”
One high-profile example he cites is the Hollywood Boulevard business improvement district’s (BID) decision to tax members to fund armed private security guards — many of them off-duty or retired police officers — to patrol what had become a seedy area with high crime.
The result was a drop in crime and disorder, fewer drains on police time and the revitalization of an American landmark.
By agreeing to tax themselves, “the establishments within the BID were, in effect, using their private resources to provide a public good,” Sharkey writes.
But not everyone sees that as a good thing.
“The tactics of armed private security officers are likely seen as reassuring to some but as repressive to others,” Sharkey writes.
CRIMINAL CHARGES, ALLEGATIONS OF EXCESSIVE FORCE
In recent years, Edmonton security guards have been accused of using excessive force, engaging in racial profiling, and unreasonably detaining people.
One former guard is even facing homicide charges. Sheldon Bentley, a former security guard at a north Edmonton strip mall, is accused of beating a 51-year-old homeless man to death and robbing him in 2016. Bentley ’s trial on manslaughter and robbery charges is set to begin in June.