Mike Zielinski
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THE ERA OF DUAL LAW ENFORCEMENT IS HERE AS GOVERNMENT AND CORPORATIONS HIRE RENT-A-COPS TO GUARD BUSINESSES AND GATED COMMUNITIES AND TO BREAK STRIKES. NOW, ABUSES BY THE PRIVATE SECURITY INDUSTRY AND ITS EMPLOYEES THEMSELVES THREATEN PUBLIC SECURITY.
Propelled by public panic over crime, the private security industry is one of the fastest growing enterprises in the U.S., spending more money and employing more guards than public police forces around the country. In 1990 alone, $52 billion was spent on private security, compared to $30 billion on police. More than 10,000 private security companies employ some 1.5 million guards, nearly triple the 554,000 state and local police officers.
And the industry which generates billions in profits is growing rapidly. One congressional advocate of increased regulation says national labor statistics indicate that more jobs will be created in the private security field than any other categories over the next decade. Industry executives estimate that the number of private guards will surge to 2 million by the year 2000.
Amidst heightened public fears in the wake of the Oklahoma bombing, fresh threats by the UNABOMBER, and recurring references by the press and politicians to the menace of foreign terrorists, the industry is poised for boom times. With the 1996 presidential election looming large, both major political parties are sure to issue more strident calls for stepped-up policing, both public and private.
DUAL LAW ENFORCEMENT
The era of dual law enforcement is already here, with a vengeance. Private guards are popping up everywhere, patrolling shopping malls, workplaces, apartment buildings and neighborhoods. The phenomenal growth of massive private shopping malls, and the steady shrinkage of public shopping streets, means the public is more likely to encounter private security than public police on a daily basis. The business community already pays for security in malls, stores, offices, banks, and highly congested public places such as New York City's Grand Central Station. And as federal funding recedes, many municipalities are looking to cut costs further by hiring rent-a-cops to work ambulance services and parking enforcement, as well as to watch over crime scenes and transport prisoners who increasingly face incarceration in corporate-run prisons. California, always the harbinger of disturbing new trends in American culture, goes beyond putting private guards on the street. Wealthy residents of Los Angeles hire their guards complete with squad cars. The City Council has 50 applications pending to barricade public streets to facilitate the work of these private security cruisers.
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http://mediafilter.org/caq/CAQ54p.police.htmlStrikebreaking and Intimidation
Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America
by Stephen H. Norwood
By the first decade of the twentieth century, a multitude of private detective agencies had emerged that specialized in recruiting and transporting strikebreakers and armed guards. These agencies often conducted business on a national basis, establishing branch offices across the country. One of the largest, Bergoff Brothers and Waddell of New York, promised it could supply 10,000 strikebreakers to a corporation within seventy-two hours, mobilizing probably more men more quickly than the federal government could. Given corporations' enormous demand for strikebreakers in the early twentieth century, the business of supplying them could prove very lucrative. R. J. Coach, head of a Cleveland detective agency that specialized in this service, during the 1910s wore "diamonds set in platinum," as he sat "amidst
splendor" of an office decorated with "rare oriental rugs." James Farley was paid more for providing the men that broke the 1905 New York Interborough subway and elevated strike than President Theodore Roosevelt received during his entire administration.
Both labor espionage and the supplying and transport of strikebreakers and armed guards by detective agencies had begun during the late nineteenth century, coming fully to fruition as a business in the first two decades of the twentieth. The world renowned Pinkerton Detective Agency, founded by Scottish immigrant Allan Pinkerton in 1850, pioneered both in providing armed guards during strikes, to protect company property and strikebreakers, and in supplying labor spies. During the quarter century from 1866, when Pinkerton agents served as guards in a Braidwood, Illinois, miners' strike, through the 1892 strike against Carnegie Steel's mammoth plant at Homestead, Pennsylvania, Pinkerton guards were involved in about seventy labor disputes.
Pinkerton had few scruples about whom it hired as guards, nor did the multitude of detective agencies that later emulated it. It recruited them by placing newspaper advertisements, by roaming the waterfront in search of men desperate enough to go to sea, and by combing army and navy recruiting offices for men not accepted for military service.
In 1892 the role of corporate mercenaries received significant public attention for the first time when 300 Pinkerton agents, hired by Carnegie Steel to guard its Homestead works, became involved in a bloody gun battle with strikers and their supporters, after the river barges on which they had been transported were fired upon. In defeating the Homestead strike, with Pinkerton assistance, Carnegie Steel for all intents and purposes destroyed the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers (AAISTW), which had called it, and eliminated trade unionism from the steel industry for almost half a century.
Pinkerton's spectacular success in infiltrating the Molly Maguires, a Pennsylvania Irish-American miners' secret society suspected of violent acts and sabotage against management, demonstrated the potential of labor espionage as an anti-union weapon, and led corporate business to implement it on a massive scale. At the request of Franklin Gowen, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal & Iron Company, Allan Pinkerton in 1873 sent an agent, James McParlan, disguised as a fugitive from a murder charge in Buffalo, New York, into the Pennsylvania coal fields. Not even Gowen knew McParlan's identity. McParlan's two and a half years of undercover work produced the evidence that resulted in the hanging of the leading Mollies. The Pinkerton agency "profited handsomely" from the affair; employers inundated it with requests for labor spies.
http://uncpress.unc.edu/chapters/norwood_strike.html
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