International Journal on Criminology Volume 5, Number 2, Winter 2017/2018 | Page 9

International Journal on Criminology
security.” Contract security is, by definition, private. The term comes from the
work of Clifford Shearing and Philip Stenning on North American private security.
An old white paper from Quebec, Private Security: The Partner of Internal Security,
which preceded the establishment of the regulatory authority, notes that “contract
security refers to the security services offered on the market by companies, agents,
or individuals on a contractual basis, as well as trade in security products and systems.”
5 Contracts, or the decision to enter into a contract (we return to this below),
lie at the heart of the private security relationship; it establishes the market’s very
existence and, consequently, the requirement that the law of supply and demand
function optimally. Contractual private security is an economic good.
In France, the term “contract security” is less well known. Frédéric
Ocqueteau has repeatedly spoken in terms of “commodified security,” but in order
to discuss in a somewhat critical sense the creeping privatization of security. This
has not helped the term’s conceptual development. The hesitant adoption of the
term in France makes clear that the economic approach to private security is less
developed here.
But while contract security is necessarily private, as opposed to taxpayer-funded
public security, the term does not cover all forms of private security.
If we keep within the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word, and within the economic
approach, contract security contrasts with internal or in-house security, with what
we call “internal security services” in Book VI of the CSI. Contract security is first
of all a choice between internalizing and outsourcing a function, a choice made on
the basis of a number of economic, legal, and social criteria: in-house skills, quality
control, expertise, cost, legal responsibility, and so on. Conversely, from the sociological
and, in a sense, political point of view more fashionable in France, there is
no fundamental debate about the difference between internal and contract security:
when we speak about private security agents and internal security services, on
this view, “we can [ ... ] accept that they form a category of individuals performing
much the same sort of task.” 6
The choice between contract and internal security quickly leads to a broadly
economic approach and provides the foundation for many of the questions to be
asked at today’s round tables. At this point, several examples of internal security
should be discussed, which will help us understand contract security and give us
a richer view of contractual issues in private security. These examples show that,
in all attempts to regulate private security activities, any political approach is ultimately
bound up with an economic one:
• Spain: internal security services, and more specifically assignments carried
out on the ground, are prohibited by the 1992 law regulating the sector. 7
5 Ministry of Public Safety. December 2003. La Sécurité privée. Partenaire de la sécurité intérieure,
10. Québec.
6 Valcarce. La mercantilisation, 184.
7 Interministerial Delegation on Private Security. “La sécurité privée en Espagne.” Mission Report,
July 6–9, 2012, 14–15.
4