Introduction

In 2015, one of us attended a conference in the United Kingdom on policing and markets. Coming from Canada, the tone and tenor of the discussion about the expanding role of the private sector in policing was striking. For most attendees from the public police and the security industry blending in among the academics, private penetration of the public policing realm was deemed a fait accompli. Conference goers used phrases such as ‘the ship has sailed’ and ‘the genie is out of the bottle’, to refer to seemingly irreversible inroads of private security into police practices. Correspondingly, security industry representatives at the event made formal and informal pitches to woo public police, seeking to sell cost-saving packages and security management solutions, and encourage administrators to further divest. There was discussion of ‘core tasks’ of criminal justice and how to create ‘efficiencies’ via privatisation (Hancock, 1998). Notable criminologists (for example Spitzer and Scull, 1977; Shearing, 1992) have been alerting scholars and seeking to make sense of this trend for some time.

For us, the shocking part of observing these UK developments first-hand is that in Canada the public police presence is not receding. Instead, public police budgets are mostly growing; public personnel numbers are not in sharp decline. Though there is some mild civilianisation, there is no hollowing out, and there are few public–private partnerships. There are no scenarios like in the UK where entire front and back offices of police are outsourced to G4S (Dehaghani and White, Chapter 7, this volume). Currently in Canada that is unfathomable. Police are starting to charge ‘users’ for some items but are not selling off the institution to the private sector.

Of course, Canada has a robust private security industry, with private security personnel easily outnumbering public police several fold. Yet the status of private security is much lower, and private security is thought to be distinct from public police even though some private security personnel occasionally seek to act as public police. Though Canadian governments have outsourced and privatised numerous other Crown and state entities, such as energy and telephone ministries, there is little appetite in Canada to apply those ideas to police.