Dyson College of Arts and Sciences
Issue link: http://dysoncollege.uberflip.com/i/128987
b. Corporate Security Many scholars have observed a trend toward the privatization or corporatization of security functions once associated with the public sector. Indeed, the notion of "PrivatePublic Partnerships" has been described as a bland euphemism for the privatization and contracting out of government services. Private operators are now deeply involved in managing prisons, protecting VIPs, providing perimeter security for bases and gated communities, policing malls, even engaging military operations and intelligence gathering. This has been combined with a general trend toward the corporatization of risk management, with a growth of private pensions, the insurance industry, and the specialized emergency medical services for the wealthy. This is fundamentally reorganizing the politics of public services, space, policing, and emergency management to privilege those who command the resources to pay for them. Security becomes not a right, claimed by the political citizen, but rather a commodity paid for by a consumer. It was impossible to miss the corporate presence at the Summit on Resilience. The logos of Boeing and Target were displayed prominently on the cover of the program and we were informed that our sumptuous networking lunch was courtesy of our corporate sponsors. At my dining table were several security managers of major multinational corporations. Standing in line to register for the conference and pick up my name badge, the man in front of me was wearing a T-shirt sporting the logo of Blackwater, the controversial private military company now rebranded as Xe. One of the keynote speakers informed us that the skills for reconstruction were "all in the private sector." A representative of Target claimed that the retail chain was a "vital part of the nation's infrastructure." The first session after the opening plenary was a "Private Sector Panel," featuring executives from Verizon, Rudin Management, and Atlantic Health System, who all displayed supreme confidence in the private sector's capability to respond to disasters quickly and efficiently. Almost every panel and speaker at the conference spoke about "public-private partnerships" as an unqualified good, an important element of the "unity of effort" supposedly required from all sectors of society in "Securing Our Future." But the efficacy of the increasing involvement of the private sector in security provision was largely left unquestioned. The selection of panelists, their remarks, and the questions of participants also constructed the "private sector" in very specific ways, focusing overwhelmingly on large corporations. Nonprofits, community organizations, and unions were barely mentioned. When speaking of the post-9/11 "economic recovery" of Lower Manhattan, the focus was largely on the telecommunications, retail, and financial services, rather than on small businesses, despite the preponderance of street vendors, restaurants, dry cleaners, artists, musicians, hairdressers, cafes, hawkers, performers, and even "panhandlers" who make up so much of downtown's economic life. "Security" and "Resilience" in this setting meant protecting the flow of finance, goods, and services controlled by major corporations, not the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people. Indeed, a growing social science literature is demonstrating that privatized and corporatized approaches to security can exacerbate social inequality, giving the rich greater protection than the poor. Moreover, absent effective regulation, security companies sometimes avoid accountability for human rights abuses, contract violations, and poor labor practices. Media reports indicate some private security guards use their privileged access and arms to run extortion rackets or conduct "inside robberies" on their clients. While governmental security forces are at least theoretically accountable to their citizens and international law, the regulation and control of private security forces is much less well defined. In short, while the word "corporate" implies 26