Two Faces of Private Protection: Contrasting Responses to Intruder Alarms and Security Guards in Britain, 1920s-1960s

• In Event: Protection and Prevention in the Governance of Crime: Historical Perspectives from Sweden and Britain

Abstract

The period from the 1920s to the 1960s was an interregnum in the development of the security industry in Britain. These years stood between the established lock and safe industry of the Victorian and Edwardian era and the long boom in security enterprise in the later twentieth century. These years, though, witnessed the early development of what would become two major sectors of the security industry: intruder alarms and ‘manned’ guarding. And as these new sectors emerged, the first signs of what would become significant areas of official and public concern with commodified security became visible.

This paper contrasts official and public responses to intruder alarms and security guards. Unlike the much longer-established locks and safes, these new security commodities seemed directly to implicate the public police, either by enrolling them in private networks of protection (in the case of alarms) or by seeming to offer a potential usurper to the police role (in the form of security guards). Both commodities were thus the object of significant comment and scrutiny, both in public and in private. Yet scrutiny and concern took quite different forms: with alarms, concern focused primarily on the prevalence of false calls and the consequent wastage of police time in response; with guards, concern centred on the creation of ‘private armies’ with the potential for political coercion and the violation of civil liberties. The paper argues that public and official concern about the security industry is historically specific, arising at a particular time for specific reasons. Moreover, it argues that the social, cultural and material specificities of particular security commodities shape contrasting patterns of perception, both past and present.

Author

• David Churchill, Leeds University