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The Security Officer: Overextended and Underappreciated

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Abstract

Frontline private security is a thriving industry, with over 20 million private security personnel estimated to be employed across the globe in both the private and public sectors (Provost 2017). Although security officers’ primary task is to protect people and assets, their work profile is by no means limited to this. While many of their functions are very similar to those of police patrol officers, as Jones and Newburn (1998) demonstrated through a case study of the multiple policing actors operating in a district of London, their role often extends to a wider regulation of social life in the sites they are employed to secure.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Mahesh K. Nalla

  2. Cybersecurity and Criminology Centre, University of West London, London, UK

    Alison Wakefield

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  1. Mahesh K. Nalla
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    Martin Gill

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Nalla, M.K., Wakefield, A. (2022). The Security Officer: Overextended and Underappreciated. In: Gill, M. (eds) The Handbook of Security. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91735-7_28

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