You arrive back home from holiday late at night to find the house ransacked – your jewellery, the smart TV, the laptop all gone. You reach for the phone and dial not the 101 number that will connect you to the police but your local private security force. They reassure you they’ll have one of their officers over right away to take evidence and a detective around first thing.
It may sound dystopian. But with police forces under strain from cuts – police numbers are at their lowest levels since the early 1980s – there’s a growing business in private security. £200 a month will buy Kensington and Mayfair residents a subscription to My Local Bobby, a bobby-on-the-beat service with nationwide aspirations. In Frinton-on-Sea in Essex, 300 people pay £2 a week each for overnight patrols by a security company. And the creeping privatisation of once-public spaces such as shopping precincts and parks means private security guards are becoming a familiar sight in towns and cities; in 2015, there were 50% more security guards employed in the UK than police officers.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2yS5k0H
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