Managing Risk and Preempting Immorality in Private Employment of Public Police

Abstract

This article examines risk management and moral regulation of private employment of public police (or PEPP). Drawing on a study of 104 North American police departments and analysis of interviews with police and private employers, police policies and procedures, and police assignment logs, we first identify PEPP contexts. We then argue that risk management is as much of as by public police officers. This risk management is sometimes preempted by moral regulation of police officers focused on objects, spaces, and suspect employers and which partially aims to preserve police legitimacy. We then discern four means of managing risk: department-coordinated assignments, officer reporting for superior assessment, private user liability insurance for temporarily hired officers, and opportunistic third-party commercial brokers. The article makes an empirical contribution by exploring risk management and moral regulation of PEPP and a conceptual contribution by lending more understanding to risk management and moral regulation in sociolegal studies.

Keywords

Immorality legitimacy moral regulation paid detail private employment public police risk management security

Introduction

In North America, most public police departments permit hiring of officers by external – often private – organizations to provide security detail (Giles, 2017). Similar arrangements are in place in the United Kingdom¹ (McLelland, 2016), Australia (Ayling and Shearing, 2008; Robertson, 2013), and Ireland (Garda Inspectorate, 2015) for major private concerts, festivals, as well as sporting and similar events. Police departments typically assess each event or location before making officers available. For example, in the United Kingdom, ‘[e]very event has a different category of policing demand, based on…the level of risk involved’ (Garda Inspectorate, 2015: 352), although how that level is assessed remains opaque. This private employment of public police (PEPP) and the issues it raises are emerging internationally. Drawing on an empirical study of PEPP in 104 North American police departments, this article examines police officers as subjects of risk management and moral regulation in these private settings, a realm relevant to broader sociolegal and policing literatures. In an era of growing exchange between private and public police sectors (Button and Wakefield, 2018; White, 2012), our interest is in how department superiors conceive of police officers in private employment sites, the related risk management and moral regulation efforts (to avoid risk and moral spoilage), and their implications.

Based on the analysis of police policies and interviews, this article argues these public police officers are privately hired for risk management purposes, but the risk stemming from PEPP from the police department’s perspective becomes tied to risk management of officers themselves. In PEPP, risk management is as much of as by public police officers. This management is sometimes preempted by a department’s moral regulation of police officers in relation to PEPP, which entails linkages of moralized elements such as objects, spaces, and suspect employers. This moral regulation is evinced in police organizations’ preemptive imaginings of what might happen, not the public’s actual reaction to seeing a police officer working in, with, or for morally spoiling elements. We suggest that sometimes when officers manage risk for private employers via their presence, the risk posed to officers and to the department creates a tension that must be addressed. The resulting preemptive decisions can erode police legitimacy (Côté-Lussier, 2013; Tyler, 2004) and a sense of the public good too. We contend this is because police officers are sometimes halted from entering the spaces where their police departments identify a greater likelihood of violent and other crime and thus known to require a police presence. We then identify four overlapping means of managing risk related to officers employed at these private sites: department-coordinated paid detail assignment, officer reporting for superior assessment, private user liability insurance for temporarily hired public police officers, and third-party commercial brokers. This article makes an empirical contribution by revealing details of risk management and moral regulation of PEPP across many police departments and a conceptual contribution by refining understanding of risk management and moral regulation especially as they relate to public police legitimacy.

Conceptualizing Risk Management and Moral Regulation

In a thorough explication of risk in criminology (see also O’Malley, 2008, 2010, 2016), Garland (2001: 51) asserts that ‘risks are estimates of the likelihood impact of dangers’ and that ‘[u]nlike dangers or hazards, risks never exist outside of our knowledge of them…’ (2001: 52). Further, he comments: ‘Risks are relationships of possible adversity, calculated and assessed by someone’ (2001: 53). But morality is not so calculable (Hier, 2011). We consider the PEPP realm as one where uniformed public police officers, who are thought to be visibly upholding the rule of law and through whom justice is served, enter a private employment world where the aims of employers and perils present are largely hidden from the public and oversight (also see Hobbs et al., 2000). This causes concern within the police organization about risk, including moral and physical risk, as well as about legitimacy.

Public police are entrusted to maintain the rule of law, rendering work for specific private organizations risky. As one news media commentator noted, this includes reputational risk: ‘These “duties” don’t involve any policing whatsoever, yet they are paid as if they are doing police work…This denigrates the reputation of the police’ (Casey and Loriggio, 2015). In PEPP, public officers are imagined arriving morally pure, but with a potential to become morally tainted by what they encounter in private employment. We know little about how increased risk and moral spoilage occurs.

Work on private security is also relevant to moral regulation, despite not necessarily embracing this concept. Loader et al. (2014) invoke the notion of a moral economy in relation to how contract private security, but not necessarily public police working as private security, is morally tainted. Other work has revealed how private security work is deemed ‘dirty work’ (Lofstrand et al., 2015), including Hobbs et al.’s (2002, 2003) work on bar bouncers and how they both manage risk of violence and are themselves a source of risk to be managed (also see Hadfield, 2008). Other private security arrangements are revealed to be moralized, as Loader and White (2018) show in their account of industry award celebrations of heroism of private security guards that works as a kind of self-legitimization. Elsewhere Lofstrand et al. (2017) similarly write on private security ‘as a moral drama’. For PEPP, moral tainting and an assumed need for regulation due to its ‘dirty’ nature may be less inherent to the personnel involved (police departments and officers rather than contract firms and guards), and more to the spaces, practices, and objects they regularly encounter in the provision of this private (rather than public) security. PEPP also threatens to damage police legitimacy since there may be some moral spillover that is not as easily avoided as in simple contract private security, a point we return to in the conclusion.

Hier (2008: 180) notes ‘all forms of moralization involve one group of people acting on the conduct of others’. Hunt (1999) provides a framework for the study of such moralization. For Hunt (1997: 280, emphasis added), the ‘“moral” dimension is not a distinctive characteristic of the regulatory target but rather is found in the linkage posited among subject, object, practices and their projected social consequences’. He writes further

Moral discourse links a moralized subject with some moralized object or practice in such a way as to impute some wider socially harmful consequences unless…subjected to appropriate regulation. Moral regulation…is relational. (Hunt, 1997: 280)

This means that there is nothing inherently immoral about objects, spaces, and practices. We suggest below, however, that if police officers are ‘subjects’, then ‘object’ or ‘practice’ includes persons (as objects) and spatializing practices (or spaces) as well and that these become factored into police administrators’ regulation of frontline police officers in PEPP.

Douglas (1990) instructs that risk is a component of moral responsibility language, and thus risk and morality are intimately linked (see also Ericson and Doyle, 2003: 6). Moral regulation often demands risk discourses, but the converse is not necessarily true. Hunt (2003: 165) argues ‘risk analysis has generated an expansion and intensification of…moralization’ and identified a ‘tendency for studies of risk to overlook the moralization that accompanies…[how] the invocation of risk intervenes in social life’. Moral regulation is distinguished from risk management in how it is unhinged from actuarial calculation. Instead, moral regulation proceeds with notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. We acknowledge that moral regulation overlaps with risk management, but nonetheless that there is a moral realm of public police practice. We distinguish moral regulation from risk management of police as subjects since the former has been especially neglected in relevant literatures. In moral regulation of frontline police officers, administrators seek to regulate the kinds of private employment accepted, including location, what objects are involved, and for whom. This is accomplished through department policy or paid detail assessments (depending on the department), at least until a permit is received by an officer or an employer’s hiring becomes routine. Police superiors assess the risk level and moral status of the proposed employer, work space, or object with which officers are deemed to likely come in contact. For PEPP, the moralized agent is the police chief, coordinator, or other administrator and to some degree police officers themselves; the moralized object or target is an officer’s off-duty employment, a set of practices, and a feared social consequence (degeneration of the police image and legitimacy in the public eye). Below we lend understanding to risk management and moral regulation of PEPP and how these two converge. We also suggest that any perceived immorality of police can detract from police legitimacy.

A growing type of PEPP is called ‘paid detail’, also termed ‘special duty’, ‘paid duty’, ‘secondary employment’, and ‘off duty’, in the United States and Canada and ‘non-public duty’ in countries beyond, such as Ireland. This is PEPP’s most prominent form and entails uniformed public police receiving a high wage from mostly private businesses to temporarily provide security at major sporting functions, retail malls, construction sites, roadways, film production sites, funeral processions, and other sites and events. Paid detail means selling security to external organizations and individuals. Uniformed officers in 2016 were paid in addition to their regular on-duty police salary almost US$37 per hour in New York (New York Police Department, 2017), and often less in most other North American cities. When administered by the department, a small administrative fee is typically charged to private employers to cover costs. Paid detail assignments are arranged but not monitored once officers are dispatched by police departments in New York and Toronto. In other departments such as Detroit’s and Cleveland’s, private employment is arranged by officers who apply for formal approval of security (or other²) employment from a department superior. Officers are expected to follow these arrangements partially to reduce risk and immorality.

In what follows, we describe typical PEPP arrangements and review literature on risk management and moral regulation related to police. Next, we elaborate our conceptual framework and explain methods and research procedures for our study. We then identify the main types of private employment contexts of public police in the departments studied followed by an exploration of risk management and moral regulation in private employment. To conclude, we reflect on how our analysis extends understanding of risk management, moral regulation, and police legitimacy.

Risk Management, Moral Regulation, and Public Police

Public police manage populations deemed to be risky (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997) and morally regulate marginalized urban populations (Dalton, 2007; Hubbard and Colosi, 2012). However, public police officers are also subjected to risk management and moral regulation, perhaps no more often than when officers are privately employed. A survey of nonfederal police departments in the United States together employing 143,000 officers revealed 80% now allow officers to secure security-related private employment (Stoughton, 2017: 1847). Such arrangements are far from risk-free, especially from police department administrators’ perspectives. In 2014, paid detail work permits of 20 Buffalo, New York police officers providing security for private employers outside bars were suspended due to perceived risk to officers following a violent incident in Molly’s Bar (Terreri, 2014). In 2015, Toronto Police halted paid detail assignments at the Toronto, Canada, nightclub called ‘Muzik’ following a fatal shooting there during a paid detail shift (Powell, 2015). The Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice referred to paid detail of New Orleans police officers as the ‘aorta of corruption’ (O’Hara and Sainato, 2015: 151). In other departments, police officers are prohibited from working in or outside adult entertainment or sexually oriented businesses. Police departments engage in risk management and moral regulation of officers, deciding where and to whom they can sell these services. This means not all potential employers can purchase paid detail services from police departments; police administrators deny some due to perceived risk, including risk to the department’s reputation.

Previous research about risk management and moral regulation in relation to public police is of several kinds. Risk and public police work garnered attention eminently in Ericson and Haggerty’s (1997, 2002) accounts of police as risk managers and knowledge workers (see also O’Malley, 2010, 2015, 2016). Yet, in private employment, officers rarely serve as knowledge workers; their mere presence to help manage private and public risk is typically what is purchased by private entities (Lippert and Walby, 2014). It is this presence in private spheres that creates risks for police departments that must be managed or preempted. Ericson and Haggerty’s (1997) account attends to ‘risk to the police organization’, including how new technologies serve as risk management and surveillance tools of public police officers in their daily work: ‘In the very process of using communication technologies to accomplish their work, police officers are subject to surveillance capacities, which are able to monitor and risk profile officer conduct’ (1997: 394) and identify means of risk management of these ‘police populations’ (1997: 400–406). Yet this managing of ‘police populations’ has been largely neglected in scholarship since. On risk management of officer practices within police departments, Walker and Archbold (2014: 224) have remarked that there is ‘little evidence-based research on the use of risk management in police agencies’. The main exception is work on public video surveillance and on police body worn cameras (Ariel et al., 2017; Lippert and Newell, 2016) that has led to what Goldsmith (2010) calls ‘policing’s new visibility’. However, these accounts rarely place risk and morality at the center of analyses. Sandhu and Haggerty (2017: 94) note an omission in the study of body worn cameras of ‘wider symbolic risks to the legitimacy of police organizations…from the circulation of controversial [camera] images’ from ‘more senior police’. While we could not locate a single instance of a department policy requiring officers to have body worn cameras in PEPP, this article addresses this department perspective gap more by examining PEPP policies and practices.

Studies related to morality and police specifically tend to focus on police as agents rather than subjects or targets (Bradford and Jackson, 2017; Gill, 2002). Much moral regulation literature has emphasized how public police morally regulate sex-related offenses and sex work (Johnson, 2010; Law, 2014), as well as offenses related to drugs, gambling, and alcohol consumption (Hathaway et al., 2011) – all commonly but not inevitably moralized elements.³ The few studies of PEPP (Brunet, 2008; Reiss, 1988; Stoughton, 2017) neglect how risk management and moral regulation shape these practices, although one recent study of paid detail in the United States identifies risks but not how they are or should be managed (Lyle, 2015). These studies discern vital issues while remaining silent on moral regulation.

Method and Research Procedures

We used several complementary methods to study PEPP in North America. Even though PEPP is burgeoning in places like Australia and the United Kingdom, we focused on North American departments as this is where PEPP is most developed and documents and interviewees are more available. We issued freedom of information (FOI) requests for PEPP documents from more than 100 Canadian and US departments, conducted 108 interviews with paid detail users and 12 with police administrators and officers from numerous US and Canadian police departments, and examined locally driven reports and reviews of paid detail arrangements (e.g. in Toronto) and print and online media coverage of paid detail policing developments.

Interview participants were identified mostly in paid detail assignment logs from police departments acquired through the FOI requests. Potential participants were invited via letter or e-mail to participate consistent with the standard ethical protocols. Unfortunately, most users and police personnel contacted did not choose to participate. Nonetheless, we sought to locate at least one interviewee from every department, if only a user or administrator. A relatively large number of interviews spread across the departments were eventually conducted. Given the limited research grant resources available, this was preferable to interviewing many users and police from only one or two departments, which would not have revealed a broad portrait of paid detail policies and practices. Interviews were typically an hour in duration, were semi-focused, and were conducted both by telephone and in person. Most questions were open ended. For users, these questions included ‘Why did you decide to use paid detail officers?’ For users and police representatives, questions included ‘What do officers do while on paid detail assignment?’ Transcribed interview data were then analyzed to discern themes concerning risk and morality.

Interviewees included 10 police administrators who made policy or key decisions about paid detail. More interviews with frontline officers about PEPP might have been useful but such an arrangement demands complex, often protracted police department approvals. Unfortunately, such an arrangement was unavailable or infeasible with departments where this was sought, especially knowing we were without personal connections (e.g. an ‘in’) that might have facilitated or accelerated this access. A major challenge to accessing active frontline officers working paid detail stems from occasional public controversy over these assignments (Lippert and Walby, 2014) in media and officers’ corresponding reluctance to discuss an arrangement that could ultimately result in a reduction of extra income opportunities if criticism followed. Even if access to officers was eventually secured with a department, however, there is a risk of being presented with officers specially selected by police administrators to present a case for paid detail or otherwise justify existing practices, rather than a random sample of volunteers. In this respect, the acquired FOI information and media accounts are potentially more objective regarding officer assignments especially and avoid this potential problem of administrator-selected officer bias. Another strength of our research design is that other researchers can replicate our approach using data obtained from the same or additional FOI requests or media accounts.

We made FOI requests to 104 larger US and Canadian police departments for paid detail policies or equivalent and assignment data over several years. Responses varied wildly. Many departments decided not to make the requested information available by referring to exceptions in relevant FOI legislation. Some other departments provided estimates, consistent with FOI legislation, of the costs to generate the requested documents which far exceeded our budget to cover them. Others provided only partial information about assignments for a shorter period than requested. Still other departments nearly fully disclosed their paid detail policies and assignment information either for a modest fee or for free (for a fuller sociolegal account of our research procedures and the barriers encountered, see Luscombe et al., 2017). The department policies and assignments reported on here constitute available data only; had other departments provided this information, it would have been included in our sample and it is possible that, though unlikely, a slightly different picture would have emerged. Our sample is biased toward larger departments in North America since they tended to be the only departments that kept PEPP records that could be acquired. Identifying paid detail users for possible interviews was largely limited by these FOI disclosures from larger departments too because these records were the primary means of identifying users to contact for interviews. A weakness of our sample is that it is not generalizable to all police departments in the United States, Canada, or internationally, especially since in the United States, there are many small departments comprising only several officers that may have paid detail arrangements, although following initial contact some of these small departments appeared to be without written paid detail policies and assignment logs altogether. Yet the PEPP documents analyzed for this article represent the most comprehensive and up-to-date data available regarding major police departments, because to the best of our knowledge, there is no other depository or central source of this information in existence. For our analysis, we closely focused on policies from 16 police departments, eight from the United States and eight from Canada, as well as paid detail assignment logs from seven departments, including two of the 16. Policies and assignment data only sometimes overlapped due to some FOI requests yielding disclosures of assignment logs and others yielding policies.

Types of Paid Detail Assignments Present and Absent

Information about paid detail is hidden in the machinery of police departments and not available directly in documentary form. However, analyzing assignment logs assembled from FOI requests about paid detail sanctioned by seven North American departments yields a revealing snapshot of assignment types (see Table 1). This uncovers the result of departments’ moralizing and risk management decisions. As significant as the types present are types that are absent. These frame a moral picture of PEPP by what is present and absent and by what kinds of sites in which officers are deemed safe to work and those sites presumed not to be. Our examination of paid detail assignments in North American police departments revealed that the most common users are related to construction or transport, special events on public property such as parades, television and film production, and traffic and related municipal requirements (see Table 1 outlining the frequency of each type). Types of establishments, assignments, and sites are conspicuous by their absence as potential users of paid detail, such as nightclubs and adult entertainment clubs, bodyguarding, or sex-related, gaming, check-cashing, and jewelry businesses. Preclusion of such legal and often licensed establishments or events (not covered by the ‘other’ category in Table 1 either) is a result of risk management and moral regulation, since presumably the associated businesses desire paid detail presence and security for their products/services, workers, and clients as much as any other legal establishment or event. These settings that are imagined damaging to the moral reputation of police departments or place officers at risk of physical harm or immorality are denied or not encouraged to apply for paid detail.

Table 1.

Type of organization/event for paid detail in seven police departments.

Type of organization/event	Percentage
Construction/transport	19.8
Special event/parade	9.7
TV/film production	6.6
Traffic/municipality	5.0
Bar	3.7
Sporting event	3.1
Electrical/utilities/engineering company	2.9
Jail/detention center	2.7
University/college	2.6
Security	2.3
Funeral home	1.5
Concert/music festival	1.3
Parking lot	1.3
Religious institution	1.2
Liquor/beer store	1.0
Shopping center/mall	1.0
Social service	1.0
Others^a	33.3

^a These 17 types of organizations/events each comprised less than 1% of total assignments.

Private Employment as Risk Management by Public Police

Private employers of the kinds in Table 1 tend to see paid detail officers’ presence as a tool for managing the risks of holding an event or running their business. One employer explained: ‘[W]hen it comes to any event…what if something like this were to happen, we definitely want that extra, added insurance that “hey, at least we did our due diligence”’ (Central Canadian City 3). An employer from another city explained that purchasing paid detail policing for

the Walkathon, allows for peace of mind for the parents…and for us as a school in terms of risk management and liability…then that’s working to our benefit because we place them at the spots where a police presence is better for the students…crossing the street, but then also with the visual presence to the drivers just within City. They see there’s a police officer so they’re…paying attention…the risk management and the liability factor is a bonus as well. (Central Canadian City 4, emphasis added)

Elsewhere an employer remarked upon paid detail’s risk management effects:

[W]e…had one accident occur at a [road] construction site that injured a pedestrian, and had that paid duty officer not been there, the guy might have died. The guy literally saved his life by running from his paid duty…so having that presence is certainly not a benefit just to vehicular traffic, but to the travelling public…We had complaints from politicians of people speeding…so I put a paid duty officer there to enforce speed limits…we wanted to make sure that the community and the contractors weren’t at risk. (Central Canadian City 6, emphasis added)

Ericson (2007: 57) reported that in New York City, the ‘post-9/11 increase in private security would be driven by contract stipulations of the insurance industry’. Yet, in some instances, for private employers holding public events, their own private insurance demands paid detail officers, rather than private security. However, it is the presence of police that matters and is thought to reduce risk of crime or unwanted behavior by users and insurers. Upon exiting the public sphere and contracting with the private sector, public police almost never do ‘information work’, deemed as ‘the means and ends of police work’ (Ericson and Haggerty, 2002: 252–253). PEPP is not knowledge work. Rather, officers’ presence is purchased in a private realm. The character of this presence renders it risky and potentially immoral in the eyes of police administrators and their imagined public.

The link between surveillance and risk management of officers through information technologies is severed when police exit the public sphere to enter private places and arrangements often hidden from public oversight and department monitoring. Here, department-provided technologies and knowledge – laptops, criminal record and wanted person information, and body cameras (e.g. Seewer, 2017) – normally deployed by patrolling officers are left in the public sphere. Some police departments justify paid detail by suggesting that its private nature would instantly shift to public use should the need arise:

We have one particular liquor establishment that hires three or four extra duty officers every Friday and Saturday night. If the bar down the block had a large brawl outside in the street, those officers are leaving and coming to help. (Eastern Canadian Police Representative 1)

Paid detail policies often require officers to at least carry a radio which, in emergencies, could return them to a public realm. Yet departments rarely require regular check-in during private assignments. Thus, radios are not a form of department oversight of officers but rather the single tether that can yank officers back into sacred public duty emergencies. Without it, the officer is imagined temporarily lost for a time in a risky, private world.

Private Employment as Risk Management of Public Police

The risks associated with private employment of officers working to manage risk can shift into risk management of police officers. Ericson (2007: 11) explains ‘it is a paradox of risk management efforts by organizations that they both advance the ability to govern uncertainty and at the same time produce new uncertainties’. One representative of a Western Canadian police department, which had a restrictive paid detail policy, pointed to risks to be managed:

There’s some organizational risk, reputational, legal, financial, and then we would consider whether or not the work you’re asking us to perform could actually be performed by a security company.

For determining risk, another department representative explained: ‘[T]here’s a variety of factors. Crowd size, type of event, past experiences, if it’s a recurring event, is alcohol being served or not at the event?’ (Eastern Canadian City Police Representative 1). Our research revealed most departmental policies specify paid detail shift duration and the required time allotted between an on-duty shift and a paid detail job. Ottawa Police ‘prohibits officers from working paid detail and on-duty shifts that combined surpass 15.5 hours in 24-hours’ (Ottawa Police, 2017). These stipulations and decisions are meant to manage the risk of fatigue leading to accidents, unnecessary use of force, and poor performance on regular duty. These risks stemming from police officer physical fatigue, unlike those regarding crime, are well-documented (Vila, 2006).

Police management adopts a crucial role in this risk management. For new potential paid detail assignments, one Canadian police manager explained the risk management process:

Our organization talks about risk management. That’s kind of the business we’re in.… Events in the region are very low risk…You’ve got…a community event to fundraise …but there’s no way we should [require]…four officers at such a low-risk event…Now over here we have a biker fest[ival]…It’s a different risk profile and we would staff it differently…So let’s talk about the more riskier [sic.] ones…We had a cricket match… when the tensions were high between Sri Lanka and India…We…had to call in resources from around the region…the risk profile has to be taken into account….

A police chief in a major Canadian city discussed how in his department police representatives meet with public event planners: ‘We all kind of get together to come up with how many members we need for an event…it’s based on risk and it’s based on the execution of the event as well’ (Western Canadian Police Chief 1). Another police department similarly had ‘a process where all interested parties are brought together in one room [to assess risk], the police, paramedics, RCMP…depending on the event’ (Eastern Canadian Police Representative 2).

Where crime risks are a central determinant of denying or canceling a paid detail arrangement, a tension between private employment of officers to govern (crime) risks and the need to reduce (crime) risks to officers themselves can emerge:

[I]f there is a business [where]…there are continually issues at that location for crime, and that’s even with the officers working there…If there’s shootings at that club or there’s narcotics going on there and the officers constantly having to make arrests…the department may pull that permit, and the officer will no longer be allowed to work there. (US Police Union Representative 1)

Since they are demanding payment for providing security, paid detail coordinators cannot assert there is zero risk associated with a public event to a private employer and thus no need for paid detail service since there would be no demand for it. The argument for the need for users to purchase paid detail would fail if there were no stated risk in the given circumstance. Yet too much risk from the assignment promises to spill onto the department and officers themselves, putting the latter at physical risk and the former at reputational risk if such acts are ignored. Interviews revealed this spillage can lead police coordinators to preempt provision of paid detail officers or demand that so many officers be hired as to render a potential event infeasible for private users going forward. The first lesson of criminology is that most crimes are not reported to police (Ericson, 2007: 3), including those at private sites of police employment. But police departments prevent officers from entering sites in North America such as Buffalo, New York’s Molly’s Bar, Toronto’s Muzik nightclub, and Seattle’s string of nightclubs, once they become recognized by the local department as criminogenic. In a major Southern US city, a police representative explained how some sites are never provided with paid detail:

[I]f there’s businesses that have a history of crimes going on at their location, continually having problems, it may be possible that the business had been involved in…organized crime in the past, that permit will never be approved and the officer will not be allowed to work there. (US Police Union Representative 1)

Such decisions undoubtedly are made in police departments beyond North America too in deciding that some risk levels are simply very high. However, such preemptive decisions scratch away at police legitimacy and public purpose: Why would public police officers be prevented from entering the spaces where there is a greater likelihood of witnessing and responding to violent and other crime and thus known to need a police presence? This leaves public police legitimacy on perilous ground. Thus, police administrators responsible for negotiations must manage paid detail created by officers’ and police unions’ demands for supplements to officers’ sometimes low public salaries (especially in the United States). This means steering between two extremes: one where there is so little ostensible crime risk that they cannot demand event organizers purchase paid detail (and which the police department could not afford to fully staff using public monies) and the other where there is too much crime risk that surpasses thresholds for their own officers’ physical safety or potentially shedding light on officers looking the other way while crime occurs.

In Seattle in 2017, this was mismanaged. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating Seattle police officers and the officers’ union, suggesting they ‘may have engaged in intimidation and price-fixing while working lucrative off-duty jobs’ (Miletich and Carter, 2017). The private employment relationship raised issues of risk and morality and was subsequently criminalized.

Table 2 reveals the prohibitions in 16 North American police departments for off-duty. What is deemed risky varies by economic, social, political, and cultural context (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997; Hier, 2008: 180). This is true of public police departments and their view of private employment of their officers. A finding evident in Table 2 is wide variation in risk management and moral regulation of PEPP across North American police departments; what is immoral in one is not elsewhere. Some identify marijuana by name, others address sex-related practices, others are more concerned about cash or bodies, and so on.

Table 2.

Paid detail/secondary employment prohibitions in 16 police departments.

North American police department↓	Labor dispute	Conflict of interest	Security/bodyguard	Discredits department reputation/Dignity	Cash/Valuable	Checking baggage/ID/Screening	Criminal organization	Liquor served/Clubs/Bars/Cannabis/Gambling	Sergeant/Chief’s approval required
Boston (PD)									Yes
San Francisco (SE)	X	X		X	X			X	Yes
Chicago (SE)	X	X		X	X			X + Medical cannabis center	Yes
Jacksonville (SE)		X	X	X	X			X + Services of sexual nature	Yes
Miami (PD)		X	X	X		X		X	Yes
Tampa Bay (PD)	Limited	X		X					Yes
Austin (SE)	X	X	X	X	X	X	X	X + Strip centers/Sexually oriented business	Yes
Seattle (SE)		X	X	X	X			X	Yes
York Regional (PD)	X		X	X	X	X		X	Yes
Winnipeg (PD)	X	X			X		X	X
Edmonton (PD)									Yes
Hamilton (PD)	X		X (‘Bouncer’)		X			X
Halifax Regional (PD)		X	X	X				X	Yes
London (PD)	X	X	X	X	X	X			Yes
Ottawa (PD)	X	X	X	X	X			X	Yes
Calgary (PD)	X	X	X	X			X		Yes

X = prohibited, PD = paid detail, SE = secondary employment.

Preemptive Moral Regulation

While crime risks have a moral quality – since officers are thought to potentially be seen by the public looking the other way when working in private realms – we discerned an array of other moral restrictions on spaces, objects, and employers with which public police are not permitted to associate but which are not necessarily physically dangerous. Risks deemed to have a moral quality are preemptive full stop. There was no cost–benefit calculation or knowledge gathered about circumstances, and in this sense, these are not about risk management (Haggerty, 2003). These elements are not merely catalysts of moral concern but constitute it. The categories discussed below become linked in ways that render assignments or jobs morally risky. Following Hunt (1997), these linkages constitute the immoral in PEPP and in police practices more broadly. These can leak into one another, since an object must be used in a space, an officer’s presence presumes a space, and an employer dictates what spaces, even public ones during some events, will be opened for that presence. In most policies regulating paid detail, police departments seek to ensure private employment takes place at sites unlikely to generate negative public optics for the officer and the department.

Moralized Spaces

The moral regulation literature has shown how particular spaces, such as ‘adult businesses’, are moralized through law. For example, zoning regulations in the United States require these businesses operate a defined distance from ‘innocent’ uses of space, such as churches and schools (Valverde, 2003: 48) due to the adult businesses’ assumed capacity to somehow morally damage the latter through osmosis. Five kinds of spaces were deemed by police departments to be similarly morally risky, inherently having the capacity to morally corrupt officers working within them: adult entertainment clubs with or without alcohol service, bars/other clubs or events where alcohol was served, sites of gambling, sites where sexualized services or goods were sold, and places that dispensed marijuana or sold marijuana-related products. A Southern US police department representative underscored one such preemptive relation in place when asserting there are ‘certain locations that are completely not within the realm of ever being approved and that includes strip clubs…a City police officer could never work a job like that’. Chicago Police Department’s policy stipulates such work not be performed for events that involve the US First Amendment that protects freedom of religion, speech, and the press. No evidence in policies or other documents was obtained that explained why these spaces were singled out, and no evidence was provided to show greater risk of physical harm to officers.

Objects

Objects from the private realm are deemed in policies to potentially morally corrupt officers. These objects can become problematic depending on whether officers handle them or are in proximity. These include alcohol, nude or elite bodies, sexual aids, cash, and valuables. One Eastern Canadian police department representative explained: ‘[W]ith the bars, if a liquor establishment hires us, we are on the outside, we do not go inside. We are not to be inside security…even though they’re hiring us, and our job is to not go inside’. For many departments (though not all, see Table 1) whether alcohol sales are the main source of profit for a paid detail employer determines which employers are permitted to employ paid detail officers. York (Ontario) Regional Police’s paid detail policy prohibits officers from ‘[a]cting as the only or primary security for an event or location where the primary purpose of the premises is the sale of alcohol’ (York Regional Policy, 2015). This is echoed by Winnipeg Police Service’s policy, which stipulates that paid details are not to be granted where a potential employer has a ‘liquor license [establishment] where alcohol is the predominant source of income’ (Winnipeg Police, 2015). Seattle Police’s policy prohibits paid detail at a business ‘that sells, produces, or dispenses marijuana, marijuana-infused products, marijuana extracts or marijuana concentrates’ (Seattle Police, 2015). Seattle Police Department also restricts officers from working paid detail for establishments ‘that sell or dispense intoxicating beverages’ (Seattle Police, 2015), peculiarly not specifying ‘alcohol’. Nor are drugs other than marijuana – a widely touted ‘corruptor’ in the policing literature (e.g. Bayley and Perito, 2011: 4) – commonly remarked upon in this and other policies.

In other departments, valuables or cash can apparently corrupt officers. According to one police chief, these became corruptible if ‘handled’ by an officer:

There’s some duties we just don’t do. We don’t guard money, we don’t do cash security. We tell them just to hire Brinks or a private contractor…We would never handle cash. We would never handle tickets. It’s not something that we would do as police officers. As far as guarding cash…at a marathon sporting event or something…there’s nothing legislated around it, we just have that in our own internal policy. (Western Canadian Police Chief 2)

Serving as a personal body guard is also prohibited by many departments. One police chief explained their department ‘was asked to be a personal bodyguard for a performer and [the request] was denied. We do not do bodyguard security. They were recommended to explore other avenues such as a private security firm’ (Western Canadian Police Chief 3). The closeness of the vulnerable elite body brought with it risk that could rub off on police. Touching cash or valuables, being close to bodies, or being present in a space was enough to be deemed immoral.

While accounts of police corruption such as Bayley and Perito (2011: 4) suggest its forms include ‘gambling, prostitution, and alcohol’, little attention is paid to whether objects, spaces, or suspects involved cause this corruption. Mere proximity to alcohol, marijuana, cash and valuables, and certain bodies is deemed enough to risk morally tainting an officer. While some policies focus on space, objects were deemed to have a morally spoiling potential on their own, irrespective of space, splashing the officer with immorality irrespective of officers’ agency. This suggests these objects are assigned luring powers, regardless of where they are located or what officers do with them. There are no actuarial calculations reflective of risk management by police policymakers (Haggerty, 2003); instead, they imagine ‘worst-case’ moral scenarios (Ericson, 2007) and install ‘just-in-case’ policies as preemptive tools.

Suspect Employers

Some kinds of employers – seemingly irrespective of space or certain objects’ presence or proximity – were deemed morally risky. Some employers associated with criminal organizations could not privately employ officers: ‘Anything that we think is related to some nefarious purpose like if it’s…like an organized crime group or something that wants us at a dinner, we don’t do those sorts of events either’ (Western Canadian Police Representative 1). In other domains of policing, these groups might be considered suspects; in PEPP, they are deemed sources of reputational risk and preempted from paid detail provision. A chief from a large Canadian city indicated changes in paid detail arrangements for this reason:

We don’t attend…jewelry stores or anything like that…[N]ot just anybody can do paid duties either. You have to be a legitimate business or source that would actually require a policing presence for a public safety issue. So you just can’t use it…[if you are] afraid we’re going to get robbed so we want the police to stand at the front door. (Western Canadian Police Department Chief 2)

Department administrators do not deem PEPP as a means of infiltrating suspect employers, of gathering criminal intelligence about drug or other operations leading to charges following assignments. Rather, without the department means of avoiding moral risk linked to these suspect employers while gaining information, such as through anonymization of drug trade ‘tipsters’ in ubiquitous Crime Stoppers programs (Lippert, 2002), or going undercover (which creates its own risks to police legitimacy, see Ross, 2007), departments prefer to simply preempt officer contact with suspect employers.

Means of Managing Risk and Morality in PEPP

Moral regulation is preemptive in this realm, but we also identified four ways of managing risk to officers stemming from PEPP: department-managed paid detail coordination and assignment, officer reporting for superior approval, private liability insurance by users and related or additional training and testing, and third-party commercial ‘vampires’ for users (and departments). We discuss each in turn.

First are formal, sometimes elaborate paid detail units within police departments that screen paid detail requests and assign officers according to department guidelines. These units are typically paid for using an administrative fee added to employers’ cost for each assignment. This is a model of ‘cost-recovery’ found in, for example, Ireland, except that officers’ extra pay there is called ‘overtime’ for ‘non-public duty’ rather than ‘paid detail’ or equivalent (Garda Inspectorate, 2015). Where previously absent, these paid detail arrangements are an emergent trend in US police departments (O’Hara and Sainato, 2015). We discerned paid detail requests from private users are typically sent to a department coordinator, rather than having individual officers assess whether they could undertake certain private employment opportunities. These coordinators and their offices that ultimately answer to police chiefs determine whether, where, and when officers can work paid detail. Paid detail requests to Jacksonville (US) police are submitted to their Secondary Employment Unit, which ensures officers are scheduled according to an event’s size and other factors. Halton Regional Police paid detail requests are similarly sent to a Paid Duty Management System to determine eligibility of a given request and, if granted, also officer assignment. Peel Regional Police in Ontario indicate: ‘The number of officers required for an event will be assessed according to the nature of the duties’ (Peel Regional Police, 2017). One office in a large regional police department we toured was self-contained with four full-time coordinators fielding calls and entering related data. Some requests were denied due to location and nature of the employer and because of officer characteristics. These coordinators can be thought of as risk knowledge brokers (O’Malley, 2004) and moral regulators (Hunt, 1999). Some departments have introduced random officer assignment after basic vetting (how many hours the officer has worked or whether they were on light service due to an injury and so on). One company working for a department whose representative was quoted above sold paid detail software to manage these assignments.

A second form of risk management, where paid detail systems and coordinating units were absent and the paid detail policy was vague, involved officers requesting approval from superiors to work for employers or for an event. Policies dictate individual officers are to bring the possible employment information to the chief or supervisor, or the Sheriff or Deputy Superintendent for their approval (see Table 2). Here, officers are ‘responsibilized’ to manage risk in selecting security employment before alerting their superior. Officers of such ranks must approve requests for paid detail officers. For PEPP, these ranked officers have the power to grant or deny permission, designating the superior to be the ultimate manager.

A third form of managing risk in these situations is requiring employers to purchase private liability insurance on behalf of the paid detail officers while they work for them. This may or may not be required in addition to those arrangements above. Gary, Indiana’s police department requires that ‘[b]efore beginning a second job, the officer must have his employer complete a form and provide a $1 million liability insurance policy’ (Chicago Tribune, 2015). This is about managing the risk of physical injury to officers. This risk to departments is real. For example, in Detroit, an officer was charged in 2017 with assault and the Department is now the target of a US$25 million civil law suit after this officer working security at a grocery chain unjustifiably assaulted a customer (CBS, 2017).

There also exists additional training of officers paid for by a minority of users, sometimes to manage what the insurance industry calls ‘moral risks’, that is, less than active officers on the job (also see Rappaport, 2016). Sometimes additional training was involved to manage this moral risk. For example, for a large road construction project, public police were ‘trained’ and then ‘tested’ to ensure they would not be passively ‘sitting in the car’ during assignments:

We started…21 kilometres of pipeline. We heard…[that] paid duty officers…would come out…sit in the car, didn’t know what they were doing…[We needed] to develop some sort of training program for paid duty officers…[W]e hired…a retired senior [police] inspector…[and developed] a training program…explaining the project, what we wanted accomplished, why we needed paid duty services…They had to do a mini test…to qualify for paid duty services on this project…We’ve had…instances where officers went through the program and it didn’t work out. We said “…get him off the list.”…So, most of them have…been very active, and that’s the goal, to prevent these paid duty officers…doing nothing. There’s no excuses and…the paid duty coordinator…does sporadic visits. He corrects it. (Central Canadian Paid Detail User 1)

The lack of direct control over public officers in private sites led to this arrangement of acquiring a broker to vet officers and monitor their work.

A fourth, growing means of managing risk is what we term ‘vampire’ private paid detail companies. These firms contract with employers for a hefty fee to cover their insurance requirements and work with police departments to draw officers for assignments. They ‘suck’ revenue otherwise destined for the police department generated by an administrative fee designed to compensate for publicly funded uniforms, benefits, and past training of officers (i.e. cost recovery). These go-between brokers siphon revenue from paid detail processes in exchange for managing associated risks. This was found to take several forms. The Texas-based Frizell Group claims to mitigate risk so police departments can reduce paid detail administrative costs (Frizell Group, 2017). Although rare in Canada, paid detail is so lucrative in Seattle that a market for public police assignments – potentially nourishing several ‘vampires’ – has emerged. One is an UBER-like brokering firm through which users can request officers online, and for a fee, it then dispatches willing officers to their doorstep (Miletich and Carter, 2017).

Conclusions

We have explored risk management and moral regulation in PEPP. Paid detail security is a trend found in police departments from Detroit to Dublin, but it and the issues it raises have received little scholarly attention to date. We found that risk management by police converges with risk management of police. A tension can develop between the risk of crime demanding paid detail presence and the risk of crime demanding that paid detail cease. This is a tension that police administrators must mitigate and that is especially acute for events or spaces frequented by the public but also in and around bars and nightclubs when paid detail is permitted there. Such tension begins to erode police legitimacy since if police are not present to reduce crime in areas that ostensibly need it and are at great risk, it raises questions about the police mission and prospects for police legitimacy and accountability (Loader, 1994).

We discerned that risk management of private employment takes four overlapping forms and often takes on a moralizing quality. Our interviews reveal one reason private employers seek to hire paid detail police officers is to avoid what Loader et al. (2014: 482) call the morally ‘tainted trade’ of private contract security. Police officers are also deemed to risk being tainted through paid detail arrangements. Moral tainting may inhere not in private security officers and firms, but in spaces, practices, and objects, they and public police doing paid detail security work encounter in the provision of this private (rather than public) security. This also threatens to damage police legitimacy since there may be some spillover not as easily avoided through the legitimation work in which contract private security engages (Loader and White, 2018). Except to occasionally claim that PEPP puts more officers out in ‘public’, albeit working for a private employer at any moment (Lippert and Walby, 2014), and thus available for emergencies should they arise, there is little effort by police departments to legitimize PEPP to the public. Instead, they tend to preempt involvement through moral regulation. When officers do become privately employed, their involvement sometimes becomes publicly visible due to criminal incidents or other problems (Lippert and Walby, 2014). This then ‘signals that a public service…is differentially available to those who are willing and able to pay…[and more broadly] corrodes the value of that good’ (Loader et al., 2014: 479).

We have shown moral regulation of public police overlaps with risk management of public police and entails linkages of elements such as spaces, objects, and outside suspects, which are not mutually exclusive. These linkages constitute the immoral in PEPP. When officers encounter these elements in PEPP, this is seen to threaten police legitimacy. Such encounters can undermine the association of policing with the rule of law and the public good (also see Livingstone and Hart, 2003). We have further refined understanding of this moral regulation by showing ‘feared social harm’ (Hunt, 1997: 280) with which it is associated in moral regulation literature – in this instance fear of reduced police legitimacy – is sometimes limited to an organization’s imaginings of what happens in private realms. Moral regulation is evinced in a police organization’s preemptive imaginings of what might happen, not the public’s actual reaction to seeing a police officer working in, with, or for morally spoiling elements. Our analysis also reveals that preemptive moral regulation in PEPP is not due to an existing moral regulation movement or political subjectivity but instead is internal to a police department’s workings and imaginings and that these vary considerably. The fact that risk management of and by police becomes intertwined and that some risk management is sometimes preempted by moral regulation has been neglected in previous research too. Finally, this article underscores that public police can be subjects of risk management and moral regulation as well as agents, suggesting a need to consider both positions and how they might interact in future sociolegal research on these processes in relation to public police and undoubtedly to other regulatory organizations.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely thank Ian Warren and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant number 435-2015-0223.

Notes

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