Private Police and Security Governance: Mapping Emerging Trends and Future Directions

• Date: 01 February 2020
• Author: Mahesh K. Nalla,Anna Gurinskaya
• DOI: 10.1177/1043986219890208
• Published date: 01 February 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1043986219890208

Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice

2020, Vol. 36(1) 101 –109

© The Author(s) 2019

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/1043986219890208

journals.sagepub.com/home/ccj

Article

Private Police and Security

Governance: Mapping

Emerging Trends and

Future Directions

Mahesh K. Nalla1 and Anna Gurinskaya2,3

Abstract

In this article, we outline a brief overview of the growth and trends in scholarly

literature devoted to the study of private policing and the private security industry in

crime and security governance over the past five decades. More specifically, we draw

attention to the scholarship addressing private policing and the shifts in the discourse

of the subject of security governance during this time both from theoretical and

thematic foci. In doing so, we identify potential future directions in which this field of

private policing studies is moving.

Keywords

private security, private security guards, private policing, police legitimacy, security

governance

Introduction

The nature and role of the government as the sole agent of social regulation in the

governance of the state has been debated for many decades. The presence of multiple

actors to regulate and govern both public and private spaces is well documented in

recent decades. Post Keynesian political rationalities resulted in the dispersal of regu-

lation (O’Mally & Palmer, 1996) and the appearance of policing functionaries in vari-

ous forms that are referred to as “networked” (Crawford, 2006) or “nodal” (Shearing,

2001) governance. The first set of actors constitutes private security guards (PSGs)

and corporate security personnel performing varieties of tasks, sometimes in uniforms,

1Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

2St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia

3Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, St. Petersburg, Russia

Corresponding Author:

Mahesh K. Nalla, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA.

Email: nalla@msu.edu

890208CCJXXX10.1177/1043986219890208Journal of Contemporary Criminal JusticeNalla and Gurinskaya

research-article2019