Public Corporate Security Officers and the Frontiers of Knowledge and Credentialism

Introduction In this chapter, we examine public corporate security work. We focus on corporate security in 16 of Canada's municipal governments – referred to throughout the chapter as municipal corporate security (MCS) – and discuss how public corporate security has entered Canada's federal government departments. Conceiving of public corporate security as a new frontier of security provision, we show how it has become part of policing and security networks, as well as how knowledge, technology and strategies from the private security and insurance industries are being transferred into public government. Engaging with sociologies of networked security governance, security consumption and risk management, we argue that public corporate security contributes to the securitisation of spaces through asset protection, risk and liability management, and employee surveillance. We discuss how the work of MCS specifically is animated by a discourse of urban threat, showing how MCS practices in Canadian cities blur the line between policing and securitisation. We also consider the implications of our analysis of public corporate security for understandings of policing, security and public accountability on the frontier of knowledge and credentialism. The latter refers to the increased and at times over-valuing of security educational credentials and the growing demand for them for corporate security work (see also Collins, 1979). New urban security arrangements involving MCS are perhaps best symbolised by an unnamed official routinely watching a pre-screened employee sign for a plastic card allowing access to a newly restricted, non-public urban zone, with pre-screening and zoning determined using assessment tools from the private corporate world. MCS entails uploading a corporate-style arsenal of specialised knowledge, technology and strategy to regulate municipal workers, ‘corporate assets’ and properties. This inevitably also engages disadvantaged people living on the streets or near these properties. MCS securitising aspirations are starting to transform city-owned and leased edifices as well as public spaces like parks, squares and streets used by urban dwellers. MCS departments are implicated in: • surveillance for major public events (which entails threat assessments); • securitisation of municipal buildings and property; • dealing with ‘broken windows’ and other forms of ‘nuisance’, for example liquor consumption as well as homeless people (who in Western Canadian cities especially are disproportionately represented by Indigenous peoples) on municipal property; • legal liability management.

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