I have absolutely no reason to believe that it’s safe to allow that ‘security guard’ to walk out into the parking lot alone with me to my car. How do I know that person can be trusted?
I don’t know that security guard’s background or personality. What if it’s the kind of not-so-trustworthy person who got a job where they wear a button down black shirt and carry pepper spray so they’d have access to women in dark, nearly empty parking lots at night?
It’s only a good idea if there’s a very good reason I can trust this total stranger to be alone with me near my car, or to follow me to my house. How well are they screened? If it’s on a volunteer basis (as it was where I went to university), what assurance do I have, at all, that the ‘escort’ isn’t there because it’s a target rich opportunity? Seems foolish to me to invite a stranger up to my door, show them where I live (in the case of college), just because they’re wearing a certain uniform.
But on the other hand, if said rent-a-cop raped you, wouldn’t it be pretty easy to pinpoint your attacker after the fact ?
That would seem to be a factor in any would-be-rapist’s decision in picking positions in which he could have access to vulnerable women.
This logic is shaken, but does not necessarily fail, if said rent-a-cop rapist is intent on killing his victims or injuring them so much that he wipes out their short-term memory.
Having spent a fair portion of my career with secondary jobs in private security, and as a district supervisor for a security corporation in my more impetuous days, I’ve found that security officers fall into one of three catagories.
Hard working men and women who either A. see no other option due to their lack of education or abilities. Or B. Simply enjoy the work, and enjoy helping people.
Misfits/malcontents who have managed to evade the grip of the law, and in the spirit of quid pro quo, decide to live life on the other side of the line for a while.
The wanna-be. The male, typically 19-27, usually white, most often overweight (considerably) with a revolving account at the local police supply house. These are people who have a desire to protect and serve, just not the knowledge, skills or ability to do so, not to mention the psychological make-up.
In all three cases, however, any length of time on the job will lead one to discover how diverse and how sometimes difficult the job of a security officer is. People will disregard you dispite the company giving you the requisite authority to enforce their policies, they will go out of their way to disrespect and insult you yet you are not allowed to respond for fear of getting fired.
It’s not an easy job, no job is really, but even though what gorgon pointed out is indeed true, dealing with the general public (yes, you) is a job so specifically demeaning and infuriating at times, that there is no comparison anywhere in the job market.
What makes things worse for private security officers is that they realize after a while that the company that hired them (the security company) is collecting 25-45 dollars an hour on their service, which is weighed against their often paltry 6-7 dollars an hour. (and yes, I know the computations for the development of margins and all that, it’s sometimes a bit high-conecpt for those not involved with it) Really, you take it from both ends as a private security officer, try and remember that the next time you insult the local “rent-a-cop” and if nothing else, just try and be a little more copasetic to your fellow humans, and follow mothers advice, “if you’ve nothing nice to say, keep you effin mouth shut”.
I would think a rent-a-cop would be less likely to rape anyone or steal anything. He might lose his job.
…and I have yet to speak to anyone who holds school crossing guards in any kind of contempt. Then again, I have yet to ever encounter a school crossing guard who thought she was The Second Coming Of Dirty Harry, either.
School crossing guards serve a valid purpose, and only exist at certain times of day, when that purpose is there. The rest of the time, they’re ordinary people, and as a rule, they don’t get too drunk with their authority.
Security guards, on the other hand… well, I’ve known a few, and I’ve heard a few stories…
Now that a good number of the ignorant comments about security guards have been made in this thread, let’s take a stab at actually answering the question and trying eradicate some ignorance.
Question: What purpose do security guards serve?
Answer:
[list=1][li] Observe and patrol areas that the owner wishes to have patrolled and which the municipal/county/parish police forces do not due to either not enough manpower or because it’s private property.[/li][li]Make citizen’s arrest as permitted by law, such as when apprehending a shoplifter.[/li][li]Preventing theft by the fact of their mere presence.[/li][li]Some agencies have professional investigators who investigate high-dollar thefts, embezzlements, and also other crimes against persons and property.[/list=1][/li]Some of us took the job because a private security firm advertised on the campus of the community college and it was a good fit for both the agency and the student.
But don’t let facts get in the way of the bigoted and ignorant comments you’ve read in this thread.
I’d rather just not invite such an attack by having some stranger follow me out to my car in a dark, deserted parking lot or follow me home late at night.
I find the ‘If I don’t know you, I don’t trust you to take me to my car/house’ policy works better than ‘he might not want to lose his job.’
I worked security at Buccaneers games one season many years ago (during the ten-losses-in-orange-uniforms era), for what I thought would be some extra cash and a chance to see some games.
The basic deal was first to check people’s bags for liquor bottles and video cameras etc. then, after everyone was inside, to work the field-level aisles and seats to make sure that people weren’t loitering about to get a killer view of the field, i.e. to keep the aisles clear. Then towards the middle of the 4th quarter, to watch the exits to make sure that people weren’t running inside for a few minutes of free ball.
The pay was shit and I never saw a single play in its entirety, in fact I saw maybe 20 seconds of football per game. My direct supervisor was one of the aforementioned wannabe cops who thought he had all the tough-guy one-liners but was basically one of these Napoleonic pipsqueaks who we hope one day will be thrown through a plate-glass window.
I found that my partners-in-grunthood were generally mellow, low-income folks just working a second job, like me. The low- to middle-management was where one ran into problems with people imagining themselves to be some sort of important authority figure.
For me the red flag is a mustache. If the guard has a mustache, there’s going to be trouble. No mustache, he’s probably cool. … Why is that?
Perhaps it is and perhaps it isn’t Monty, but I would certainly add that I am oddly unsurprised that you yourself are a security guard. Must be the humorless conservatism.
Well, RTA, besides that your last comment tends to, IMHO, support my earlier query, I’m no longer a security guard. It’s too long a drive to get back to Montery and Pebble Beach from here.
An addendum to my posting addressing the purposes such guards serve:
Some folks desire a career in law enforcement for good reasons (desire to serve the public, maintian peace & order, etc.); however, the tax-payer supported law enforcement agencies may not have the positions authorized to hire them. Those folks then go into private security to gain experience in law enforcement and sometimes that helps them get to where they really want to be. There are, of course, those who enter law enforcement, be it a private or public agency, for the wrong reasons, and some of those folks get to doing crimes while wearing the badge. For example: last night on Court TV there was a show about a Texas cop who was convicted of murder.
Why does all of this “security” make me feel so unsafe?
There you have it. Since we have all of this security, then there MUST be something we have to feel afraid of. It is best if we don’t try to pin down too precisely exactly what the danger is, because then we might have to contradict ourselves tomorrow. Moreover, if the threat is undefined, then any expenditures or restrictions of rights must be warranted.
God bless America.
Best of both worlds, dress the security up in stormtrooper gear - all black, pants tucked into combat boots, automatic weapon on hip. This way, not only does the guard suggest a really dangerous threat, but he imposes a little fear on his own.
Gotta love it in the federal buildings I go in and out of daily. The guards used to wear police-type uniforms. Then they went to grey slacks and maroon blazers. Then they were in riot gear. Now the blazers seem to be back. No, the changes did not reflect movements up and down the Sherwin Williams color chart o’fear.
They will allow anyone in, as long as they show a photo ID and, if not a fed employee, walk through the metal detector. But no ID, no admission, whether you are willing to walk through the detector and submit to a search or not. Makes me feel SO safe because we all know that terrorists don’t carry ID. And one can only imagine the damage an unarmed ID-less person could do with his bare hands.
Was I bitching? No. Jeez, who sounds angry here? If you had read the rest of what I wrote, I said I actually like my job most of the time. That’s why I’ve been doing it for years. It’s not an easy job, the pay ain’t great, but I do it for a lot of other reasons.
I’ve returned lost kids to parents. I saved a guy’s life once. (I’ve actually saved a couple of other people’s lives too, but only one on the job.) When I go to events as a spectator, there’s a lot of season ticket holders who want to hang out with me, visitors from out of town want their picture taken with me (supposedly I was in the Caps’ fan club newsletter, but I didn’t get to see it), and I’ve met a lot of very, very cool people. I took the job because I’m a hockey fan and I figured it was an easy way to get into a lot of games, maybe catch a few concerts, and make some extra cash… but I take my job seriously. I was hired to make sure people have a good time and nobody gets hurt (from kids playing too close to stairs to adults who’ve overimbibed), and that’s what I do. Yeah, I can get a ‘better’ job than this. I have one, full-time. I don’t even need the extra money anymore, but why should I give up something that I like doing, with great people, that gives me a sense of fulfillment when I help somebody, and happens to also pay me just enough to go someplace a little nicer for vacation? Nope, no bitching here, just trying to get people to have a little respect for the fact that we’re real people trying to get a job done, just like everyone else.
As far as whether it’s safe to have one of us escort you… I don’t know about other places, but in this state, in order to work in security, by law you must go through a criminal background check before being hired. And if you are involved in any sort of incident after you are hired, you will be fired. (A co-worker of mine nearly lost his job because of a road-rage incident, and he wasn’t even the aggressor.) At the company I work for, the applicant has to pay the fee for the background check, which discourages a lot of sketchy people from bothering.
Try actually talking to one of us like a human being sometime instead of making gross, mostly incorrect generalizations. You might be surprised.
Your posting reminds me of one day I was working at the clubhouse at Pebble Beach. My partner and I were assigned to screen people to a private property there. One woman had overimbibed to the extent that she thought she would be quite welcome there although she wasn’t on the guest list. As it happened, our senior supervisor showed up at the time I was explaining to the woman that she wasn’t invited and that she needed to find somewhere else to be. The supervisor then informed her that it could mean our jobs if we let her go by to a place she wasn’t invited. The woman’s response: “Well, it’s not like being a ‘rent-a-cop’ is such a good job anyway.” Right, like I’d rather get fired and make no money!?!?
Generally, though, the job was a lot of fun. And during special events, like the big car show, I cleaned up with time-and-a-half and double-time due to the hours worked. Most of the postings were interesting and I got to meet some interesting folks.
When I went to community college, the majority of the security guards were complete and utter morons. There were exceptions-Gus, this huge guy with a voice like James Earl Jones was really cool. But other than that…
The one was a woman who was an exotic dancer on the side. Then there was this old, cranky guy, and the head security guard, a short guy with a Napoleon complex. I swear, they NEVER knew what they were doing.
We weren’t allowed to eat in the classrooms. To enforce this, security issued that there be-NO TRASH CANS in the class rooms. Great, I’ll just throw my tissues on the floor!
Then they would give you a terrible time with the computer labs. The upstairs lab wouldn’t open until 9, unless all the other labs had classes in them-as was frequently happening. Then we’d call. And call. And they’d tell us such and such room was open. We’d go down-no, there’s a class. We’d tell them. They’d argue. We finally had to get a professor to call. And they’d come up and bitch.
Wolfgrrl, it’s frustrating at times that I can’t really display my feelings on the message board.
I’m not angry, frustrated, or anything at all. I did read all of your post. My reply was a simple statement of how annoying it is for people to say “You haven’t done my job, so you can’t know how hard it is.”
Yes, I’m sure your job is hard. So is mine. So is Monty’s.
You and he are going to go on defending the “profession” as is your right, but I believe most people have vastly more negative tales to tell about security guards than positive, so I doubt you’re going to sway anybody.
I worked as a security guard, and it was God-awful. In addition to the guys who were hired ‘conditionally’----till their FBI checks came back in, there were the screaming yuppies who didn’t care what the rules were, they wanted what they wanted, and that had better be now. I had one guy rip off his clothes in front of me when I asked him to verify his name and so on. I wound up working with a guy who had a four-page rap sheet for various offenses against women, and he was six foot eight. I’m five three. He was fired for lying about his past, but not for the fact that he kept touching female staffers and then telling them they were asking for it.
The worst part is that I was the only woman there, so it was sort of like Tailhook without the planes. When I complained, I got threatened; when I got fired it turned out there were more of them than me. I worked for one guy who insisted that he was the grandson of English royalty and had a secret CIA background. My impression was that good guards were few and far between. Most of the guys were completely and utterly passive when the truly frightening guys were being abusive, if not turning actually hostile when any of the female substitutes tried to complain, so I'm very skeptical what they'd do in case of a rape. They certainly shrugged off all the rape jokes and 'bitch' remarks.
Security guards basically exist as an insurance dodge. You get lower insurance rates if you’ve got guards, but that has to be balanced against the hiring practices. Like I said, the company I worked for assumed that people’s NCIC records would be clean, but often times they weren’t. Anybody with a pulse and a clean record could get hired, provided they could walk around. I have to say, too, that people like Kenneth Bianchi and Ted Bundy worked as security guards, so those psych tests they give you might need some tweaking.
Gorgon: I’m not surprised that more people remember their bad experiences over their usual experiences with security guards. Quick! How many times did you notice the guard at your bank or credit union? How many times did you notice the guard at the supermarket, the department store, or any number of other places you go regularly? What I’m surprised by is otherwise intelligent people deciding on an obviously deficient statistical datum to condemn an entire profession and in so condemning using a bunch of bigoted and demeaning terms.
Ahh, I see that none of you are lawyers, so you cannot know the real reason security guards exist. They exist for one reason and one reason only, standard of care and premise liability. Juries have become convinced that if you do not have a security guard present when a crime is committed, the owner of the property is responsible. How do we know this? Why, the owners of the security companies testify as expert witnesses that the standards of care for property owners is to hire security guards to prevent crimes! Of course, there is no evidence that the guards cut the crime rate, but so what?
Thus, we have these people everywhere that serve no function and a system that acts as a kind of a tax/welfare program (tax on you, welfare for the guards and company owner).
This is the actually reason we have security guards, and sadly I am not joking but completely serious.
