From a recent article:
We provide new evidence on these questions, presenting the largest empirical study of private security to date. We introduce an administrative dataset covering nearly 300,000 licensed private security guards in the state of Florida. By linking this data set to equally comprehensive public law enforcement information, we obtain, for the first time, a nearly complete picture of the entire security job market in a state. We report two main results. First, public and private security markets are primarily characterized by occupational segregation, not integration. The individuals who make up the private security sector differ significantly from the public police; they are, for example, much less likely to be white men. We also see that few private agents, around 2%, have ever worked in public policing, and even fewer will do so in the future. Second, although former police officers make up only a small share of all private security, about a quarter of police officers crossing the country have been fired from their police jobs. In fact, laid-off police officers are almost as likely to land in private security as they are to find another job in law enforcement, and an entire quarter end up in one or the other. We explore the implications of these findings, including intersections with police abolition and the future of policing, at the end of the article.
It’s by Ben Grunwald, John Rappaport and Michael Berg. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
