City University
School of Social Sciences
Department of Sociology

Helsinki 18/03/2007  1 (19)

Jorma Hakala¹

THE REGULATION OF MANNED PRIVATE SECURITY: A TRANSNATIONAL

SURVEY OF STRUCTURE AND FOCUS

Abstract.
The purpose of this article is to present a summary of transnational data on private secu-rity regulation and a profile of an average statutory regulation ‘package’. This data is to be used as reference and comparison material in future research and as basic knowledge in the ongoing debates concerning private security governance. The lack of reliable facts and figures has been and is typical in any discussions of the industry. This has led to decision making without sufficient knowledge of the industry and the effects of statutory regulation on it. The lack of research has shown itself both in a shortcoming of methodologies to collect this kind of data and in the number of publications. The survey in this study covers 40 regulatory regimes with a main focus on the EU states. The results include basic information of the administrative structures and contents of the statutory private security regulation of commercial manned services. The results indicate that there is in the majority of countries included in this research study a government controlled regulatory system. The more detailed analysis of the data emphasise a strong law enforcement (policing) aspect in the ad-ministration of the existing statutory regulation. The significance of licensing as the method of control is stressed by the results. They also show that there is a clear core group of elements regulated in a majority of the regulatory regimes included in this study. No striking differences between the statutory regulations of EU and other regulatory regimes could be noticed. Even so the EU states seem to have slightly more mature and comprehensive culture of regulation.

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1.
At the time of the survey the researcher was an advanced postgraduate student at City University, London, a member of two CoESS permanent sub-committees, the Finnish employer association representative in EU Sectoral Social Dialogue Committee for private security, an expert representative of SFS (Finnish Standardisation Association) in CEN (The European Committee for Standardisation) Task Force on private security standardisation, chair of ASIS chapter 210 (Finland) and chairman of the board of Securitas Oy (Finland).