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Police retention and recruitment are a perennial problem for law enforcement, with about 10% of officer positions going unfilled at police departments nationwide. To fill that gap and increase public safety — or at least the perception of it — some businesses and municipalities are hiring private security.

Santa Fe, New Mexico approved $750,000 in its city budget to fund private security guards in the tourist-heavy downtown Plaza. Portland, Oregon extended a $4.6 million contract for private security at publicly owned facilities. New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority augments subway police patrols with armed and unarmed private guards. And residents in cities like Baltimore and Chicago have pooled their money to hire security guards to patrol their neighborhoods

Private security guards now outnumber public police by almost 2 to 1 in the United States; more than 1.2 million people are employed as private security guards, while there are fewer than 700,000 police officers. Yet little is known about this growing segment of the workforce, says Ben Grunwald, a professor and criminal justice scholar at Duke Law School who studies the law enforcement labor market.

“Many private security officers function a lot like police officers do, and some of them also carry weapons,” Grunwald said. “They probably also have more legal authorities than people are aware of. It’s a workforce that might be inflicting serious and unnecessary harm, and we don’t know anything about who they are or what their work histories are like.”

That lack of knowledge isn’t unique to private security. Even for public police, data are difficult to obtain, Grunwald said. There are some 17,500 state and local law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and record-keeping is decentralized in most cases, even though all states regulate police hiring and most certify new officers through a licensing body.

To develop a fuller picture of the private security labor force and compare it with public police, Grunwald and collaborators John Rappaport and Michael Berg at the University of Chicago Law School examined data from Florida, one of the few states that both collect and disseminate employment data on all public law enforcement personnel and also require individual licenses for contract or third-party security officers working for licensed firms.

The team compared demographic characteristics and employment records of nearly 300,000 licensed private security officers in Florida with similar data on 121,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the state’s police departments, sheriffs’ offices, and other public law enforcement agencies.

The report, Private Security and Public Police, found minimal crossover between the two labor pools. Only 2% of private security personnel had previously served as a cop, and only about 1% moved from private security to a Florida public police agency. Among that small number who made the shift from policing to private security, however, roughly one in four had been fired from a law-enforcement job — suggesting that while crossover between the two fields is rare, it sometimes involves officers with prior disciplinary histories. 

The report also finds that the two professions vary widely in compensation: private security guards make median annual wages of $38,370 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2024) while police and sheriff’s patrol officers earn a median annual salary of $76,290, usually accompanied by public sector benefits such as a pension and the legal protections afforded to sworn officers.

The research found some people entered private security after trying and failing to become police officers; among those who didn’t pass the Basic Abilities Test, a 120-question multiple choice exam that is a prerequisite for employment as a public police officer, 15% were working in private security within five years.

The data showed private security personnel were also significantly more likely than public officers to have been arrested, with 10% of private security guards having a felony or misdemeanor arrest on their record before being hired compared to 1% of public police officers.

“They are adjacent fields, but with a very strong boundary between them,” Grunwald said.

Unarmed private security guards far outnumber those certified to carry a gun, and all generally lack police powers like issuing citations and making arrests on a warrant. Indeed, private security officers are generally intended to supplement, not replace, police forces with additional eyes and ears; Grunwald’s report cites several studies that indicate the presence of guards in public spaces may have a deterrent effect on crime.

But guards with firearm certification command higher pay than those without, and in some states like Oregon, the number of armed security guards is growing. Given their expanding role and the fact that some are authorized to carry weapons, Grunwald said more research is needed into their day-to-day responsibilities and authority, especially for those who interact with the public. While rare, there have been incidents where citizens were injured or killed by private security guards. Large gaps in data remain, he noted.

“There's a lot we don’t know about what the private security officers are actually doing,” Grunwald said.

“If they’re just sitting behind a desk and not interacting with the public, that’s one thing. But if they’re on the streets, carrying a weapon, and using force, then perhaps we should be concerned.”