A high or increasing fraction of guard labor [1] doesn't bode well for an economy or a society. It's a sign that there may be an increasing amount of defection vs cooperation in a society, either more people where the marginal calculus has tipped, or the existing defectors are working harder.
It was routine for homeowners to hire armed nightwatchmen. In Nigeria, we had a Touareg guy, with a scimitar. In Morocco, our neighbor had guys with machine guns (which meant we didn’t need much more than a wall), but we lived in a nice area. Our neighbor had some relation to the King. In Uganda, our watchman had a staff (and a holstered pistol).
South Africa has so much crime, that even the poorest neighborhoods have broken-glass walls.
The average African country is severely underpoliced. Like, severely, in a way most Westerners can't wrap their heads around. Even though Nigeria claims to have 400k cops, I'm willing to bet at least 100k to 200k are ghost officers. Just like when ISIS started their 2014 offensive and the Iraqi gov. admitted half of their army existed on paper.
And, I'm not the one saying it. Nigeria routinely purges thousands of ghost officers from salary rosters and recently claimed it had 80k ghost cops. In a country of 200 million. So, it's a no-brainer why private security is a better deal once you have the means. They're available 24/7 and often have guns, and backup, and other tech.
Similar story when I visited Nairobi with my then-partner: stayed in a fenced compound with guards; and when we visited my partner's friend, on the bus to her place we passed a supermarket which was guarded by someone holding a light machine gun.
We visited somebody in Nairobi. She picked us up at the airport. On the way into her apartment complex, she had to stop her car while the guards ran mirrors under the car to check for bombs.
We had some good family friends retire to a decent village in Costa Rica and they learned quickly that broken-glass walls were their best defense against thieves.
Police clearance rates of reported crimes have tanked in almost every category of crime. [1] Property crime saw a 30% reduction in clearance rates (17%->12%) from 2019-2022 despite funding/staffing staying flat or going up and crime rates/reporting rates going down.*
The marginal calculus could be tipping, but imo less from issues of social cohesion and more from an abdication of enforcement that necessitates more guard labor in the form of private security.
Another partial explanation is just that retail orgs are overreacting and/or cynically crafting a narrative to explain poor business decisions or changing economic conditions.[2][3][4]
> “Maybe we cried too much last year” about merchandise losses, Walgreens finance chief James Kehoe acknowledged Thursday on an earnings call.
> “Probably we put in too much, and we might step back a little bit from that,” he said of security staffing.
> However, it’s not clear the numbers add up. For example, data released by the San Francisco Police Department does not support the explanation Walgreens gave that it was closing five stores because of organized retail theft, the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2021. One of the shuttered stores that closed had only seven reported shoplifting incidents in 2021 and a total of 23 since 2018, according to the newspaper. Overall, the five stores that closed had fewer than two recorded shoplifting incidents a month on average since 2018.
> The National Retail Federation had said that nearly half of the industry’s $94.5 billion in missing merchandise in 2021 was the result of organized theft. It was likely closer to 5 percent, experts say.
Econ or Bloomberg had an article about a month or two ago about stores locking up their merch and the motivations for it, and why it's such a stupid idea (sales plummet when you need an employee to unlock deoderant). One of the reasons for locking everything up is that they don't have good inventory management systems and when a manager or higher level person sees empty shelves they assume theft...but often times it either hasn't been ordered or simply hasn't been put on the shelves. Most real theft happens from the trucks delivering the goods.
I've read a lot of articles saying that the real problem with theft is from employees.
That might be true but it certainly hasn't made me feel good about watching people walk out with a big jug of wine, electronics, a case of toilet paper, etc. That last one provoked some curiosity - are their circumstances so bad that it's worth risking jail time or are there so little consequences that it's the equivalent of self check-out?
Isn't guard labor in the US either decreasing or staying flat?
I mean, the entire reason Allied Universal exists is because security (and therefore "guard labor") IS NOT a growth industry. A stable or declining industry inevitably leads to consolidation of the type that formed Allied Universal.
Unrelated but that Wikipedia page seems to be a bit biased. What has capitalism specifically got to do with guard labor? Do communist and socialist societies not need guards, prisons and militaries?
In any case in communism majority of theft was committed by the workers themselves, so any guards would likely be in on it anyway.
The real economic system and its currency at the same time was the massive web of connections and favours. How does one guard that?
My grandfather, who was a surgeon, was reportedly particularly good at obtaining scarce goods like toilet paper - most likely as a token of gratitude for the procedures he performed.
In the USSR, stealing from work was so normalized that it wasn't even called stealing. It was just "carrying out". Jobs in restaurants and meat packing plants were highly desirable not for the wages but for how much food you could steal.
Capitalism is a system that tries to enforce collaboration between anonymous people and entities, without central planning. But what happens when that doesn’t work? Is it the government or private industry that fills the gaps?
Friedrich Hayek wrote on the topic of defending private property as a right to assert control [1]. To me, this feels particularly prevalent in high capitalist societies like the US, where the bond between people is not shared tradition, culture, and values - but rather personal freedom.
Or reducing traffic deaths from dangerous driving with a financial deterrent
Did you know that during GWOT, US military personnel deployed to combat zones were more likely to be killed in a car accident after returning home than they were to be actually killed in combat?
Cops being abusive pigs doesn’t invalidate the logic behind the law, but then again it always has been the uneven enforcement that’s the problem
IMO traffic enforcement is convenient busywork to keep cops occupied until capital needs them for something specific. As a bonus, it generates lots of interactions with the public that they can choose to turn violent if they want to let off some steam, and so keeps a persistent note of terror playing.
I figure it's both. There are 10 gorillion cops and municipalities. Some likely have policies and staff that get along well with the public and just try to administrate traffic in a safe and fair way. Some treat it as a cash cow and care more about the revenue stream than increase or decrease in harm. It's one of those things where both sides of the argument can be true in specific cases, making it perfect "internet debate" fodder.
“Nothing in the language of the due process clause itself requires the state to protect the life, liberty and property of its citizens against invasion by private actors.”
From the article, quoting the Supreme Court. I’ll admit that the police may still have a “duty” (whatever that is defined as), but it is certainly true that they aren’t required to protect the public
The central organizing principle of US society is individual freedom, which causes the crime rate to be high, so you need a high proportion of guards (sensu lato) to combat that.
In countries where the clan is the organizing principle, in contrast, your family members act as a check on your behavior, but those family members do not count as guards. (If you live in the US, your family has less influence on you because you need them less.)
There is a low level of guard labor that needs to happen in a free society, that's true, but it shouldn't be _increasing_ as a percentage, and it's not a good sign for the health of society at large if it is.
Cooperation _isn't_ the natural state of people, and we need to make sure we're increasing the benefits of working together and not just the punishments for crime. Right now, the benefits of the economy are accruing disproportionately to the wealthiest and we need to do something about that, because we're destroying the motivation for people at the bottom rungs to "play nice".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guard_labor