On my first ride-along with Intelligarde, the Law Enforcement Company, I accompanied a quality control manager while he investigated an allegation that one of his security officers had used excessive force. He spoke to a working-class Romanian man in an arm sling who had been injured during the ordeal. The supervisor was sympathetic, and clearly bothered by the incident and immediately set about finding who was responsible. As we walked toward the elevator he turned to me and admonished, ‘This isn’t what private policing is about.’ He was referring to the heavy-handed measures of his fellow officers.¹ Of course, he...

In this chapter I review extant theorizing on private policing and social control by dividing the literature into four overlapping areas. I begin by discussing Marxian orientations, which see the private police as instruments of class domination and as tools for maintaining a disciplined labour force. I then consider approaches which eschew notions of ‘state centrality,’ and which argue instead that the private police are best understood in the context of an integral plurality of state and corporate interests. Because the next two discourses I identify – ‘risk society’ and governmentality – are often linked in the literature, I consider them in...

In the previous chapter I outlined a theoretical framework for this project that seeks to bridge gaps in previous research while also asking new questions about the parapolice. This investigation extends the scholarship of risk and governmentality discourses while emphasizing the role of Marxian conceptions of commodity fetishism and political economy. As Wagner (1984) has pointed out, behind each set of research question, there exists a sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit orienting strategy. In this book I carry the postulates itemized in the preceding chapter into a case study of the Intelligarde parapolice. There are two central research questions emanating from...

As one enters Terminal 3 at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, one notices the newness of the structures, the cleanliness of the walls and ceilings, and the brightness and bustle of the building. Passengers move along various cues for airline tickets, baggage checks, and car rentals. Perhaps less noticeable are two of Canada’s federal police talking to a pair of constables from the Peel Regional Police Service. After the discussion ends, the RCMP officers begin to patrol, nodding hello to two security officers from Excalibur Security making similar rounds. Farther along, they watch two armed Brinks guards carry money satchels from...

Intelligarde’s advertising circular begins with a prosaic declaration of our times: ‘Demand for policing is up. Police resources are down.’ At the very outset, The Law Enforcement Company positions itself as an answer to citizen’s fears and shrinking state security budgets:

Every day our news media is full of reports of break-ins, vehicle theft, vandalism, fraud – the list goes on. More recently, crimes like carjackings and home invasions are becoming commonplace. Disorderly conduct and the drug culture threatens most neighbourhoods, in cities and towns alike.

At the same time, budgets for police services are being drastically reduced. Responsibility for protection...

Tasking private police forces with controlling ‘unruly’ populations is not a new phenomenon. Since the private Marine police of the Thames River, under the direction of the early police scientist Patrick Colquhoun, such organizations were required to engage in the minutiae of public and private order (McMullan, 1998: 105-6). The Marine police of 1800 enforced rules of conduct and monitored the river’s proletariat, by implementing dress codes, paying ‘lumping rates,’ managing accounting, determining wagelessness, and stopping illegal activities on London’s shipping lane. They prevented losses and apprehended thieves by applying themselves to the apparent trivialities of order maintenance: no frocks,...

Police subculture is a well-documented social phenomenon. The early works of Skolnick (1966), Westley (1970), and others (e.g., Manning and Van Maanen, 1978) demystified the working environments and occupational mores of the men who make up the ‘thin blue line.’ More recent investigations have continued to focus on the attributes of police work (e.g., Chan, 1996; Ericson and Shearing, 1986; Manning, 1996, 1997; Rigakos, 1995), for the purpose of understanding the effects of ‘recipe rules,’ ‘dramas of control,’ and experiential constructions on official (and unofficial) police mobilizations. So much qualitative information has been amassed about the occupational culture of policing...

It was near the end of my time in the field that I was escorted over to a property in the Intelligarde territory of St James Town. As we walked toward the site, I noticed that the evening pedestrian traffic on this private roadway was strangely polarized. For some reason only the south sidewalk was being used, but many people were idling about the lobby and front entrance on the north side. When I came to the Intelligarde building, I asked the site officer why nobody was congregating about their property but at least twenty people were on the other...