Introduction

The growing role of the private security industry in policing and the criminal justice system has been recognised by academics across the globe (South, 1988; Johnston, 1992; Rigakos, 2002). Studies have illustrated the expansion of the role of private security and the greater number of security personnel employed than the public police in most industrialised countries (Jones and Newburn, 1998; De Waard, 1999). Research has also highlighted the ability of private security firms to operate core state functions, such as prisons, custody suites and tagging schemes (James et al, 1997; Button, 2002). There are very few activities in the broader criminal justice system and policing that private security is not undertaking or is not capable of doing (Forst and Manning, 1999). This research, however, has so far neglected a specific overview of private security firms’ contribution to community safety. In part, this is because the contribution to policing and criminal justice more broadly overlaps community safety. Nevertheless, such is the growing importance of community safety as a concept and as a strategy that an assessment of the contribution of the private security sector in this context is timely.

Before we embark on this, however, it is important to examine the concept of ‘community safety’. Its origins lie in politicians from the left seeking to widen the ownership of the problem of crime to organisations other than the police (Hughes, 1998). There was much evidence to show crime was the product of a wide range of factors, many of which were beyond the control of the police. Many agencies, both public and private, and most notably local authorities, carried out functions that could impact on crime, but were not fully mobilised in this role. The situational and social crime prevention measures that could be pursued, when targeted within a specific community by organisations working in partnership to pursue them, has become the essence of what is meant by the term ‘community safety’ (Gilling, 1997). However, for many, the use of safety would seem to encompass a much broader range of issues, including accidents, food hygiene, risks from dangerous products and pollution, to name a few; but when the activities of community safety partnerships are explored, however, they tend to focus predominantly on crime-related risks and therefore what most would describe as ‘security’.