Private Security Forces Research Articles

Özel Güvenlik Çalışanları Arasında İşle İlgili Psikososyal Risklerin Araştırılması: Güvenlik Kültürü ve Çalışan Refahına Etkileri

The need for security is an inevitable result of social life. This need has evolved and changed throughout history. In the modern era, private security forces play an important role in ensuring public safety alongside general law enforcement units. Private security employees face high psychosocial risks inherent to the nature of their work. Therefore, it is essential to educate and support individuals, especially against psychological risks. Given the demanding and stressful nature of private security work, it is imperative that appropriate measures be taken to protect their mental well-being. In this context, raising employees' awareness of psychosocial risks is important to mitigate potential problems. Helping private security personnel to access psychological support will help them stay healthy. For this purpose, a survey was conducted among security employees and the results were evaluated. The primary objective of the study is to identify work-related psychosocial risks among private security employees and evaluate the impact of these risks on their well-being. The results indicate that individuals with 3 years of experience have the highest job satisfaction (3.51), and job satisfaction is higher among singles (3.39) compared to married individuals (3.07). It is also found that higher education levels decrease motivation. The study investigates the relationship between the psychosocial risks employees are exposed to, their experience of job stress, job dissatisfaction, job satisfaction, and motivation levels. The perception of the required safety culture in the workplace has a significant impact on psychosocial risk factors, highlighting the need for adjustments to increase employee satisfaction.

Framing spaces as (il)legitimate: “dirty” cobalt and the (mis)uses of artisanal and small-scale mining sites in south-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

ABSTRACT As large-scale mining (LSM) companies and other commercial actors capitalise on a demand boom for Congolese cobalt, they have framed artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) spaces as problematic and illegitimate to make themselves appear “cleaner” than locally legitimate artisanal mining. Firms have emphasised the negative facets of artisanally mined cobalt, characterising their own production as “clean” and problem free. Capitalist actors’ framing of artisanal mining spaces as “illegitimate” or “dirty” is a powerful narrative that produces significant consequences. First, ASM, a minority of total cobalt production, becomes the focus of negative publicity; this framing erases the negative impacts of LSM. In turn, illicit “taxation” by public and private security forces at LSM sites is overlooked despite its systemic, organised nature. Next, the framing obscures the multiple interconnections between ASM and LSM. Finally, the framing of ASM spaces allows capitalist actors to claim these spaces to reshape and “organise” them.

THE USE OF A SPECIALIZED OBSTACLE COURSE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF SPEED-STRENGTH QUALITIES OF EMPLOYEES OF THE PRIVATE SECURITY FORCES OF THE NATIONAL GUARD TROOPS

The article is devoted to the issues of improving professionally signifi cant physical qualities, employees of the private security forces of the National Guard of the Russian Federation. In the course of the analysis of liter-ary sources, the possibilities of using an obstacle course in development and improving the speed-strength physi-cal qualities of employees were revealed. In the course of the study, the author of the article experimentally proves the eff ectiveness of the infl uence of the obstacle course on the development of speed-strength physical qualities of students undergoing vocational training.

A Multidisciplinary Vision of the Criminal, Social and Occupational Risk Consequences of the Use of Police Force

(1) Background: The use of force by public and private security forces is currently an issue of great relevance because of the potential injuries caused by any excessive use of force by either active or passive subjects or a deficit in the real mastery of appropriate physical intervention techniques (PITs). For this reason, certain traditionally used physical intervention techniques have been questioned by scientific research studies and punished by justice. On the other hand, certain media have dealt with this matter in a biased and unfair manner by broadcasting videos where the use of force by police officer is displayed out of context. As a consequence, this problem has been brought under the spotlight, causing general uneasiness of the communities and rapidly spreading over social networks while favoring all sorts of parallel judgments. (2) Research method: A suit was equipped with 19 inertial measurement units (IMUs) and a Biomechanics of Bodies software application for Marras analysis of the data collected on trajectory, trunk twisting velocity, sagittal angle, load, and nature and severity of the injuries associated with the different intervention techniques examined. (3) Results: According to the data registered, the implementation of operational tactical procedures (OTPs) reduces the probability of injuries and leads to a more satisfactory outcome. (4) Conclusions: The implementation of operational tactical procedures, together with an awareness of the risks associated with the excessive use of force by public and private security forces and bodies, could reduce the risk of injuries suffered by both officers and citizens.

Where are the police in urban governance? Three investigations of police, planning, and governance in central Atlanta

ABSTRACT Urban governance theories frequently overlook policing, despite current controversies surrounding police. To help fill this gap, I investigate how urban governance institutions may influence police work. My intervention centers around the crucial point that “the police” are a diverse multiplicity of agencies, whereas previous studies on the relationship between urban governance institutions and police institutions focus on one or two agencies, usually municipal police. I direct attention to the diversity of police in central Atlanta: 11 fully sworn agencies, two private security forces employed by community improvement districts, and the common regulatory practices that are fundamentally police though not commonly discussed as such in urban studies. I use frameworks from Law & Society research on jurisdiction to analyze data from roughly one year of fieldwork on three commonly studied urban governance institutions: neighborhood planning units, community improvement districts, and university-led “anchor institution” development partnerships. I show how these agencies coordinate the public and police(s), convene diverse police elites, or foster the expectation of police caretaking. Governance institutions provide legitimate forums for police communications. This activity helps the complicated and contradictory multiplicity of police seem coherent and obscures policing’s violent contradictions, ultimately helping define the bounds of a community.

Senator Elbert Thomas and the Hope for Industrial Equity

Senator Elbert Thomas and the Hope for Industrial Equity

Are climate activists protected by the Aarhus Convention? A note on Article 3(8) Aarhus Convention and the new Rapid Response Mechanism for environmental defenders

AbstractThe parties to the Aarhus Convention recently established a new Rapid Response Mechanism for environmental defenders. This article analyses this mechanism and its guarantees for environmental defenders, with a specific focus on the protection of diverse forms of climate activism. The Convention's Compliance Committee has taken a broad approach towards the definition of ‘environmental defenders’ protected by Article 3(8) of the Convention. This definition includes persons who engage in demonstrations or rallies connected to environmental issues, even if there is no immediate link to the rights provided by the Aarhus Convention. In some cases, direct actions and acts of civil disobedience may fall under Article 3(8) of the Convention. Where environmental defenders suffer harmful acts such as penalization, harassment or persecution either by State authorities or private parties, the State concerned must produce evidence to show that these harmful acts were not a response to the civic engagement of the environmental defenders concerned. If environmental defenders are victims of harmful acts in the sense of Article 3(8) of the Aarhus Convention, they may address the Special Rapporteur who can swiftly issue protection measures. This could be especially relevant for detained persons, persons under police supervision or activists who undergo systematic harassment by the police or private security forces. In these cases, the Special Rapporteur may intervene and use their unique position on the international plane to ensure that environmental defenders do not suffer due to their engagement for the environment.

Securing a Safe City

While contemporary ethnographies on “security” focus on abstract notions of safety or the active implementation of security measures, this paper dives into the passive, subconscious structures shaping the labor conditions of residential security guards in Hong Kong. Private security forces have been around since ancient civilization and are so familiar that they have become vastly overlooked in modern society, camouflaging within the social landscape. However, private security forces are everywhere in Hong Kong, crucial to the high levels of safety and convenience of the city’s residents. Security companies display consistent employment practices showing the intrinsic nature of how companies manage their labor in a capitalist economy. This paper depicts how divides between socio-economic groups and security perceptions channel middle-aged or elderly sectors towards residential security guard employment. Additionally, labor management strategies and relationships between residents and security guards further reinforce the structure of dominance, maintaining the status quo while preventing the security guards from unionizing and creating change.

Contested water- and miningscapes – Explaining the high intensity of water and mining conflicts in a meta-study

Conflicts around access to, control over, and quality of water accompany mining projects all over the globe. Often, they are associated with high intensity as means of contestation range from verbal complaints to protest marches, civil disobedience and violent confrontations. While numerous case studies on water-related mining conflicts exist, scholarship that synthesizes insights remains rare. In order to better understand the dynamics that lead to the escalation of conflicts and to further theory development on the role of, e.g., political economic contexts, hydro-social conditions and social relationships, a systematic overview of the existing empirical evidence is needed.Our meta-study of 53 water and mining conflicts identifies several combinations of conditions that are tied to large-scale mobilization and the use of civil disobedience measures, sabotage or hunger strikes by environmental defenders. As our results show, raised stakes and ontological differences, e.g. in situations where water is essential for livelihoods and cultural and spiritual practices, play a role, in particular when coupled with a lack of meaningful participation. Discursive or physical coercion by the state or by private security forces also intensify mobilization rather than containing it while the role of international NGOs is more ambiguous. To identify explanatory scenarios, we conducted a two-step, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) based on data collected in a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Taking its data from published research, our study identifies a geographic bias towards Latin America in academic literature on water and mining conflicts and points out topical blind spots. By looking for conditions that are consistently associated with high-intensity conflicts, it also provides insights on priority areas of engagement for community leaders, policy-makers, and private sector and civil society representatives seeking to avoid the escalation of conflicts.

Dalrymple, William. The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire.

Dalrymple, William. <i>The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire</i>.

The rise of cybersecurity warriors?

ABSTRACT The increasing demand for cybersecurity has been met by a global supply, namely, a rapidly growing market of private companies that offer their services worldwide. Cybersecurity firms develop both defensive (e.g. protection of own networks) and offensive innovations (e.g. development of zero days), whereby they provide operational capacities and expertise to overstrained states. Yet, there is hardly any systematic knowledge of these new cybersecurity warriors to date. Who are they, and how can we differentiate them? This contribution to the special issue seeks to give an initial overview of the coordination between public and private actors in cyberspace. I thus explore these new private security forces by mapping the emerging market for these goods and services. The analysis develops a generic typology from a newly generated data set of almost one hundred companies. As a result of this stock-taking exercise, I suggest how to theorize public-private coordination as network relationships in order to provide a number of preliminary insights into the rise of this ‘brave new industry’ and to point out critical implications for the future of private security forces.

“Where Shall We Place Our Hope?”: COVID-19 and the Imperiled National Body in South Africa's “Lockdown Collection”

“Where Shall We Place Our Hope?”: COVID-19 and the Imperiled National Body in South Africa's “Lockdown Collection”

Conceptual study on Innovative Motivation Model to Industrial Private Security force

In recent times the need and demand for security services have grown dramatically in the wake of security threats in all sectorsirrespective of the nature of the business and size. The limitation of government is that it is neither their constitutional duty nor hasthe adequate resources to protect the private sector at all times. Given the limitations ,many private sector players in PrivateSecurity Industry took the initiative to secure their properties by training, deploying the civilians to guard the commercialestablishments. As a next step the organizations need to motivate the untrained, unskilled or semi skilled to suit to the jobdescription. The onus is on the HR and Administration manager, executives who are directly responsible for security of theproperties and people in their business locations. On the other hand the challenges faced by HR department as how to motivate thesecurity workforce cutting cross all states to run the business and to secure the propertiesInterestingly the Private security Industry's turn over is pegged around Rs.20,000 crores with employment to 70 lakhs of peopleby 2020. Undoubtedly the volume is growing exponentially. .

Os poderes dos seguranças particulares no policiamento das propriedades privadas de massa

Resumo A segunda metade do século XX testemunhou uma mudança importante na organização do espaço urbano e do controle social formal. Parte das interações sociais que antes ocorriam em espaços públicos policiados pela polícia deslocaram-se para propriedades privadas de massa policiadas por forças de segurança privada. Diante dessa realidade, o artigo analisa os fundamentos e os limites de alguns dos poderes legais mais usados no policiamento dos usuários dessas propriedades: as obstruções de entrada, as expulsões e as revistas. A pesquisa está baseada no estudo empírico de normas estatais e na análise quantitativa e qualitativa de 216 processos julgados pelo Tribunal de Justiça de São Paulo e pelo Tribunal de Justiça do Paraná relacionados ao uso desses poderes. Os resultados mostram que os seguranças que policiam os indivíduos nas propriedades de massa detêm poderes legais mais amplos do que os policiais que policiam os cidadãos nos espaços públicos convencionais. As consequências desse achado são discutidas.

Doing Violence: Suffering Bodies in a Refugee Arrival Centre

This paper draws on ethnographic research of private security forces in a German first arrival centre for refuges and asylum seekers to explore how non-private actors engage in practices of violenc...

Expanding the Thin Blue Line: Resident Patrols and Private Security in Late Twentieth-Century New York

In the late 1960s and 1970s, New York City experienced escalating crime alongside residents’ growing frustration with the inability of municipal officials and the police to curtail it. These forces led a range of New Yorkers, from those in low-income neighborhoods to those in business districts, to sidestep the police and reimagine their responses to crime. Increasingly, everyday residents formed neighborhood patrols and hired guards, while businesses and institutions employed private security forces. These developments forged a new role for private actors in the patrolling of city streets. Over time, as resident patrols waned and as security guards proliferated, the private sector gained significant new capacities to surveil and police public space. Additionally, by formalizing a cooperative relationship with private security forces, the New York police and municipal authorities captured these private resources for the expansion of the carceral state.

Global security assemblages: mapping the field

Global security assemblages’ concept, in a decade of its existence, has been a useful tool to explain a lot of atypical security collaboration between private and public entities. It has greatly improved understanding of collaboration between public and private security forces, which, until then, mostly ha0s been seen through the civil-military paradigm. Through the expansion of scenarios where private security forces have been observed (to include environments not considered either at war or in peace, but somewhere in between) global security assemblages demonstrated, on numerous occasions, examples that cooperation between private and public forces may contribute to the improvement of the global security environment. Hence, how far can we stretch this concept? Private entities operate at numerous places and contexts and the concept may be a limited tool to understand their input in achieving a more stable environment. It has been set to apply in peaceful settings, but would it be possible to extend its application in unstable environments, within unpredictable security settings? This paper looks at how the concept has been used and applied so far, the scope where it can and has been applied, and draw the limitations to its use.

Floris White Bull Responds to the Editors on Protest and the Film &lt;em&gt;AWAKE: A Dream from Standing Rock&lt;/em&gt;

Floris White Bull Responds to the Editors on Protest and the Film &lt;em&gt;AWAKE: A Dream from Standing Rock&lt;/em&gt;

Normalising corporate counterinsurgency: Engineering consent, managing resistance and greening destruction around the Hambach coal mine and beyond

The German Rhineland is home to the world's largest opencast lignite coal mine and human-made hole – the Hambach mine. Over the last seven years, RWE, the mine operator, has faced an increase in militant resistance, culminating in the occupation of the Hambacher Forest and acts of civil disobedience and sabotage. The mine provides a European case study to examine the repressive techniques deployed by RWE to legitimise coal mining in the face of a determined opposition. Drawing on political ecology literature and work on corporate counter-movements, this paper peers into extractive industries and their corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagements through the lens of corporate counterinsurgency. We first provide some background to the mine and RWE's unique position in the German political economy. After explaining the rise of resistance, the paper then discusses counterinsurgency in relation to CSR by outlining the different techniques used to win the ‘hearts’ and ‘minds’ of people around the mine. This includes securing the support of political leaders, lobbying, involvement in social events, infrastructure projects, astroturf groups and ecological restoration/offsetting work, which combine with overtly repressive techniques by public and private security forces that together attempt to legitimise the mine and stigmatise, intimidate and criminalise activists. This paper contents that counterinsurgency techniques are becoming normalised into the everyday operations of RWE, naturalising its image as ‘good corporate citizen’ and legitimising and invisibilising the violence towards (non)human nature inherent in the corporate-state-mining-complex, as mining is becoming part of the ‘green economy’ and made ‘sustainable’.

Towards a Political Theory of the Firm

The revenues of large companies often rival those of national governments, and some companies have annual revenues higher than many national governments. Among the largest corporations in 2015, some had private security forces that rivaled the best secret services, public relations offices that dwarfed a US presidential campaign headquarters, more lawyers than the US Justice Department, and enough money to capture (through campaign donations, lobbying, and even explicit bribes) a majority of the elected representatives. The only powers these large corporations missed were the power to wage war and the legal power of detaining people, although their political influence was sufficiently large that many would argue that, at least in certain settings, large corporations can exercise those powers by proxy. Yet in economics, the commonly prevailing view of the firm ignores all these elements of politics and power. We must recognize that large firms have considerable power to influence the rules of the game. I call attention to the risk of a “Medici vicious circle,” in which economic and political power reinforce each other. The possibility and extent of a “Medici vicious circle” depends upon several nonmarket factors. I discuss how they should be incorporated in a broader “Political Theory” of the firm.