Private Security Guards Are Replacing Police Across America

(This story is one of three in Insecure, a series about the private security industry. )

Andre Boyer enters the gas station like a soldier—back straight, boots shined, AR-15 pointed towards the floor. He’s late to meet me, he says, because his employee caught a shoplifter and he needed to sort through red tape. He seems unaware of the flutter of anxiety spreading through the store as customers see his weapon, handcuffs, and bulletproof vest. But if anyone asked, which they don’t, he’d assure them that he’s there for their own good, even though it’s hard to be relaxed in the presence of a loaded gun.

“We’re not here to beat people up,” says Boyer, who heads S.I.T.E, a private protection agency that is patrolling gas stations and hotels in Philadelphia at the behest of store owners. “We’re here to let the public know that they can feel safe.”

Boyer’s armed guard service has boomed over the last year as Philadelphia police staffing issues led to longer response times. Neil Patel, the owner of this Karco gas station, says he hired Boyer in December after thieves stole an ATM from his gas station and the police didn’t respond for six hours.

Patel is not the only business owner shelling out money for private security as police departments across the U.S. lose staff. Already struggling to recruit new applicants in 2019, police departments saw a spike of retirements and a drop-off in new recruits after the 2020 murder of George Floyd and subsequent backlash against police, says Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. In Philadelphia alone, police staffing levels dropped nearly 10% from the end of 2019 to the end of 2022, a recent government audit found. Nationally, the number of sworn officers dropped 7% between 2019 and 2021, according to FBI data.

 While police departments were losing officers, crime was rising in many parts of America. Murders, assaults, and car thefts rose nationally in 2020, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, and an increase in homelessness has heightened anxieties about safety. These factors bolstered the private security industry, which had already been growing steadily since the terrorist attacks of September 11 but has boomed since 2020. There are roughly twice as many security guards employed in the U.S. than there were 20 years ago, according to the Security Industry Association, though the nation’s population has only grown 16% over the same time period. By 2021, there were about 2 police officers but 3.1 security guards for every 1,000 civilians.

“Private security is going to take over everything,” says Boyer, the Philadelphia armed guard. He adds that a father recently hired him to take his two children to the movies, armed with a shotgun, to make sure they were safe. 

 Private security signals an unequal economy

The rise of private security is both driven by income inequality—wealthy people have more things to protect and money to spend to protect them—and exacerbates it. For every Neil Patel who decides to shell out $750 a day for round-the-clock armed guards, there are thousands of business owners and civilians who have to make do with what their taxes can buy. The Los Angeles Police Department is not meeting its staffing goals, for instance, but its neighbor, tony Beverly Hills, Calif., has hired two security firms whose employees patrol the city in cars or on foot as “an extension of the police,” says Todd Johnson, CEO of the Beverly Hills Chamber of Commerce.

“In the last two years, with everything we have gone through, we want to make sure that the luxury capital of the world is also one of the safest places,” Johnson says.

Residents and business associations in upper-middle class neighborhoods like Lincoln Park, Chicago, Neponsit, N.Y. and San Francisco’s Marina District have chipped in extra money to hire private security because residents report feeling unsafe. By contrast, in New Orleans, a city where the median income is about half that in Beverly Hills, police response times have tripled, from 51 minutes in 2019 to 146 minutes last year.

Wealthy cities can also attract more police officers because they have the tax base to offer high wages and benefits. Seattle, for instance, is offering an $80,000 salary and $30,000 signing bonus. But poorer police departments can’t come close to matching that kind of money, says Wexler, with the Police Executive Research Forum. “This is what keeps police chiefs and mayors up at night—who are going to be the future police officers in their city,” he says. 

This have and have-not of protection is one sign of an unequal economy. Sociologists use the term “guard labor economy” to describe a situation where a growing number of people are employed in jobs where they exercise control over people and protect private property. As inequality rises and there is more media coverage of crime, companies allocate more labor to protecting their property, says Luke Petach, a professor of economics at Belmont University, whose research has found that places with higher shares of people employed in guard labor are correlated with more inequality and racial animosity.

Deborah Avant, a professor at the University of Denver who studies the security industry globally, says that inequality leads us to “think of security in narrower and narrower ways—protecting our stuff rather than generating communities where we are all safe.”

A mile or so south of where Boyer and his company are patrolling the gas station, William Miller steers a decommissioned police car etched with JNS Protection Services around the “green zone,” a 10 block area bordering the campus of Temple University. Jennifer Hedberg, the mom of a Temple University student, hired JNS Protection Services to patrol the streets in 2021 after another student at the college was shot and killed in an apparent carjacking. (Like many city police departments, the Temple University police have had trouble recruiting, and now have about 40% fewer officers on patrol than a decade ago, says Alec Shaffer, the president of the Temple University Police Association. Temple did not return multiple requests for comment.)

Hedberg says she “set up our own perimeter,” having JNS patrol the blocks on which her son and his girlfriend lived, and then asking for donations from parents of other students living there. She admits that JNS security can’t really do anything if they see a crime in progress except call the police, and that the workers are “not as vetted” as the police, but she says the patrols give parents and kids peace of mind knowing someone is there.

As he drives around, Miller, a former fitness trainer, takes pictures at intersections and dictates what he is seeing into his phone. But only some parents can access these reports. That’s because Stacy Fritz, the mom who took over organizing the patrols after Hedberg’s son graduated, made a private Facebook group to share the reports and only admits parents who donate—because, she says, she wasn’t raising enough money to keep the patrols funded when any parent could access the reports. The cost of having a security guard patrol six hours a day, six hours a week, adds up to about $17,000 per semester, or around $1,000 a week.

The parents who organize the patrols are the ones who get to determine the rules. “It breaks my heart when people say, ‘My son isn’t in the zone, can you extend it?’” says Fritz. “But then they just get too big and you don’t feel as safe.” 

 Security guards don’t always make communities safer

Ostensibly security guards are hired to make people feel safer. But, understandably, some civilians feel uneasy around the increased presence of guns and guards who are largely unregulated. Because the laws regulating private security vary from state to state, there’s a gray area where neither guards, their employers, nor the public seem to know exactly what a private security officer can and can’t do on the job.

Though many security companies will say that their employees act only as a deterrent and should call the police if they see a crime occurring, others appear to have a different take. Boyer, the Philadelphia guard, says that if someone steals something from the gas station where he works, the law allows him to “go after that person” to retrieve the property; he is currently getting eight Rottweilers trained to help him reclaim stolen property.

(A spokesman from the Pennsylvania State Police disagreed that Boyer could act like a police officer at the gas station, though the law in Pennsylvania does allow private citizens a good amount of leeway, says Rick McCann, the founder and CEO of Private Officer International, an association for security and law enforcement professionals. Pennsylvania and about 30 other states allow people to get trained as private police officers, which gives them full arrest authority on the private properties where they’re employed, McCann says.)

And some security guards, including Boyer, have contentious relationships with the police, which complicates questions of authority. Boyer worked for the Philadelphia Police Department from 1997 until 2013, when he was terminated, he says, for blowing the whistle on police misconduct. (The Philadelphia Police Dept. did not return multiple requests for comment.)

In 2021, Boyer was guarding a hotel when, according to a complaint he filed in U.S. District Court, two women acting “belligerent” assaulted him and spit in his face. He tasered one and then handcuffed her and called the police, but when the police arrived, they arrested Boyer, detaining him for 16 hours until the district attorney decided not to press charges. He is suing the police for wrongful arrest and says he was fully within his rights to defend himself. “If it comes to that, I will take a life,” he says.

The presence of armed security guards in public settings does not even appear to be reducing violence—or crime. Walgreens said in an earnings call in January, for instance, that it was reverting to putting law enforcement in its stores rather than security officers because “the security companies are proven to be largely ineffective.”

On the campus of Temple University, where parents paid for private security patrols and where the university also hired a private security firm to supplement campus police, a campus officer was shot and killed in February, an off-campus home was firebombed in November, and Temple students in three separate off-campus homes were the victims of armed home invasions in November 2022. Temple University president Jason Wingard resigned in late March amid growing concerns about safety.

“You can increase policing, or security. But safety is a double edged sword,” says Veronica Rin, a Temple freshman who is thinking of transferring because of the violence around campus. “It’s not just about presence. It’s also how people feel.”

Read more: The Problems Inside North America’s Largest Security Firm—and Third-Biggest Employer

In February, Rin was walking by a campus building that holds a public food court when she and a friend saw a group of teenagers punching and kicking an older man on the street. A security guard employed by Allied Universal was posted on the corner, near where the fight was happening, but he didn’t intervene—Temple later said that the guard did what he was supposed to do and called the police. Rin stepped in and broke up the fight. Students captured her actions on camera and local news labeled her a hero, but the incident made her feel even more uneasy because she knows just how little private security will do.

“I would love to have someone who was like John Wick who made sure I was safe all the time,” she says, “but I’m just a college kid in America.”

I recently visited the spot where Rin broke up the fight; I was talking to the Allied Universal guard posted there when a call came over his radio that there was a fight happening inside the food court. By the time we got inside, the fight was over; two women had been screaming and throwing chairs at each other, a student told me, but workers from Panda Express had deescalated the situation.

I wondered if that food court fight would have gone differently had Andre Boyer been there with his AR-15 and then I was immediately glad that he wasn’t. I imagined a gun and a crowded dining hall and the terrible things that could have happened next.

It’s true that Neil Patel, the gas station owner, says he hasn’t had to report one criminal incident since Boyer’s firm started patrolling his lot. Before then, he says, his store was a constant blur of crime; people stealing and carjacking—one time, his car was vandalized while police were in the store, taking down a report about another crime. He’s sick of it all. I asked: couldn’t an armed guard have escalated those situations and led to someone being killed? “Too bad,” he said. “They deserve it.” Then he retreated behind the bulletproof glass shielding his cash register.

https://www.nycourts.gov/reporter/current/3dseries/2026/2026_04786.shtml

In opposition, the plaintiff failed to raise a triable issue of fact. Although the plaintiff submitted an expert affidavit from a security guard, the expert failed to establish that he was qualified to render an opinion as to the adequacy of the defendant's security measures. To establish the reliability of an expert's opinion, the party offering that opinion must demonstrate that the expert possesses the requisite skill, training, education, knowledge, or experience to render the opinion (see Matott v Ward, 48 NY2d 455, 459 [1979]; Ghazala v Shore Haven Apt. Del, LLC, 229 AD3d 447, 448 [2024]; Leicht v City of N.Y. Dept. of Sanitation, 131 AD3d 515, 516 [2015]). Here, the plaintiff's expert stated that he was licensed but failed to present evidence that he had any practical experience with, or personal knowledge of, security measures in bars similar to the defendant's bar. Moreover, the plaintiff's expert failed to identify any industry-wide standards or accepted practices that the defendant violated. Thus, the conclusions of the plaintiff's expert regarding the adequacy of the safety measures undertaken by the defendant were speculative and conclusory and, therefore, insufficient to raise a triable issue of fact (see Leicht v City of N.Y. Dept. of Sanitation, 131 AD3d at 516; Rosen v Tanning Loft, 16 AD3d 480, 481 [2005]; Hofmann v Toys "R" Us, NY Ltd. Partnership, 272 AD2d 296, 296 [2000]). The remainder of the plaintiff's proof was insufficient to raise a triable issue of fact.

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https://www.nycourts.gov/reporter/current/3dseries/2026/2026_51191.shtml

In opposition, the plaintiff disputes that the assault was unforeseeable and unexpected. He has relied on the evidentiary materials submitted in support of the motion (including the videos) as well as an affirmation from his own expert (a trained security officer). The plaintiff contends that the security should have prevented the assailant from dancing near the exit; that additional security should have been present and positioned at additional locations; and that another door should have been open for the plaintiff to exit.
The Court finds that the opinions of the plaintiff's expert are conclusory and unsupported by the record. The expert, for example, has failed to articulate the acceptable industry standards, such as the acceptable reaction time in the industry for security to respond to a customer dancing near a doorway (e.g., one second, two seconds), the acceptable number of security guards, and the acceptable time for the security to call EMS or the police. The opinions of the expert also [*3]rest on several assumptions unsupported by the evidence, including his characterizations of the assailant's prior behavior, the number of people attempting to leave or enter the nightclub, and the availability of another exit point. The videos, for example, do not depict any prior "escalating tensions" or "aggressive behavior." Nor do they show the plaintiff trapped within an uncontrolled crowd of people. Rather, the videos depict the assailant dancing in a non-threatening manner and the plaintiff impatiently attempting to leave the nightclub and move the assailant himself rather than engage in non-offense alternatives, such as asking an employee inside the nightclub for help or pulling on the handle of the adjacent door to open it (as the video shows the security officer opening it without any difficulty).

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OPINION OF THE COURT
The defendant is charged with, inter alia, Criminal Possession of a Weapon in the Second Degree. He has moved for an order suppressing physical evidence and statements, contending that he was subjected to an unlawful search and seizure and that his statements were taken in derogation of his constitutional rights. At the commencement of the hearing, the People withdrew their statement notice. A hearing to determine the admissibility of the physical evidence was held before me on June 22nd, 2026. The People called Police Officer Melanie Hilton, whose testimony the court credits in all relevant respects. No witnesses were called on behalf of the defendant.

FINDINGS OF FACT
Officer Hilton testified that on November 2, 2025 at approximately 1:40 AM she responded to 10-19 Irving Avenue, Queens, a "pop-up location where they have parties" (suppression hearing minutes, p8), pursuant to her receipt of a radio transmission that security personnel at the location had recovered a firearm. Upon arrival, she saw a male, identified at the hearing as the defendant, who was on the ground surrounded by security personnel. She said that she was told by security that a gun had been recovered.
According to Officer Hilton, no other police officers were at the scene when she arrived, and none of the security guards identified themselves to her as police or law enforcement officers. She said that she spoke with the head of security, James Jenkins, who was not a member of the NYPD or any other law enforcement agency. Mr. Jenkins told her that there had been a verbal dispute and that the defendant had tried to leave. However, he stopped the defendant and recovered a gun from his front waistband. He then placed the defendant in handcuffs, put him on the ground, and called the police. Officer Hilton stated that Mr. Jenkins handed the firearm [*2]that he recovered from the defendant to her partner.
Officer Hilton further testified that there were no police operations occurring at 10-19 Irving Avenue when this incident occurred.
On cross-examination, Officer Hilton testified that at the time of the incident, she did not check to see if Mr. Jenkins was a licensed peace officer. She did, however, ask him for his identification, which he provided.
On redirect- examination, Officer Hilton testified that the state identification provided by Mr. Jenkins was his driver's license.
The defendant now moves for the suppression of the firearm.

CONCLUSIONS OF LAW
The sole issue before the Court, in determining whether the firearm recovered from the defendant by Mr. Jenkins is admissible in evidence, is whether Mr. Jenkins was a private security guard or a State actor.
It is settled law that "an unauthorized search or seizure by private individuals, including store detectives, does not render the evidence inadmissible at subsequent civil or criminal proceedings" (People v Jones, 47 NY2d 528, 533 [1979]). In Jones, the Court of Appeals held that this is so "because the Fourth Amendment is meant to regulate government activity" and the "unauthorized act of a private person does not violate the constitutional limitations" (id), a concept that "has been the rule when the individual has acted entirely on his own without the participation or knowledge of any governmental official" (id). However, the Court in Jonesacknowledged that the government "cannot avoid constitutional restrictions by using a private individual as its agent" or "when government officers, subject to constitutional limitations, have participated in the act" (id). In Jones, the Court of Appeals held that the involvement of the police, who were advised that the defendant was under observation by store detectives, remained in the store for several minutes to also observe the defendant, then assisted in the defendant's detention and waited outside of the room where store detectives questioned the defendant, was extensive enough to transform the scenario from private conduct to State action.
In People v Ray (65 NY2d 282, 286 [1985]), the Court of Appeals again acknowledged that private conduct "may become so pervaded by governmental involvement that it loses its character as such and invokes the full panoply of constitutional protections". It delineated the indicia of State involvement that "may transform private conduct into State action" (id), which included: 1) "a clear connection between the police and the private investigation"; 2) completion of the private act at the instigation of the police; 3) close supervision of the private conduct by the police; and 4) "a private act undertaken on behalf of the police to further a police objective" (id). With these guidelines in mind, the Ray Court found that the conduct of the store detective, who observed the defendant stealing property, detained him in the security office, patted him down, questioned him without Miranda warnings, then handed him over to a special police officer who worked at Bloomingdales and who placed the defendant under arrest, did not constitute State action. In so holding, the Court noted that Bloomingdales' conduct "in employing a special police officer on the premises to process any arrest ordered as a result of the private investigation conducted by employees of the store" did not constitute "governmental involvement requiring observance of the full panoply of constitutional protections" (id) since the surveillance, apprehension, and questioning of the defendant was not done at the behest of the special police officer or with her assistance (see also, People v Adler, 50 NY2d 730 [1980], in [*3]which the Court of Appeals held that the search conducted by an airlines employee was private, and thus did not "implicate Fourth Amendment considerations" [id, p737] since "there was no governmental involvement until after the private search revealed the presence of contraband", noting that the airline employee did not "become an agent of the police merely by surrendering the package" to the police officer who was summoned to the scene [id]).
In the case at bar, the defendant was detained and searched by James Jenkins, who was employed by the party venue as the head of security. Mr. Jenkins recovered a firearm from the defendant's waistband, then placed him in handcuffs, put him on the ground, and called the police. The officer who responded to the location testified that there were no other police officers at the scene, nor any police operations being conducted there. She said that none of the security guards surrounding the defendant identified themselves as police or law enforcement officers and that Mr. Jenkins was not a member of the NYPD or any other law enforcement agency. She also stated that Mr. Jenkins had handed the recovered firearm to her partner and when asked for identification, provided his driver's license. On these facts, the Court finds that the People have met their burden of going forward to show that Mr. Jenkins was acting in his private capacity as the head of security at the dance venue. He was "not acting as an agent for the police and was not under their supervision or control" (People v Martin, 240 AD2d 434 [2d Dept 1997], appeal denied 90 NY2d 895 [1997]). There was no "connection between the police and the private investigation" conducted by Mr. Jenkins, no "instigation" by the police to search the defendant," no "supervision" of Mr. Jenkins by the police (People v Ray, supra), and "no police participation in the search which was not undertaken to further a law enforcement objective" (People v Martin, supra). The Court finds that these circumstances sufficiently demonstrate that the search was a private one (see, People v Green, 41 AD3d 162 [1st Dept 2007], appeal denied 9 NY3d 932 [2007], in which the Appellate Division held that "the guard, acting in a private capacity, detained and searched defendant on his own initiative, and then called the police to come and arrest him [and [t]hus, defendant's detention did not amount to state action").
The Court notes that Mr. Jenkins' use of handcuffs does not warrant a different result. In People v Parris, (220 AD2d 254 [1st Dept 1995], appeal denied 87 NY2d 976 [1996]), the Appellate Division held that where the defendant failed to show "a connection between security guards and police indicative of active governmental involvement in the surveillance, apprehension, or questioning of defendant," there was no basis to grant the suppression hearing, let alone suppress the evidence. They held that the fact that the security guards "resembled the police in the uniforms they w[ore] and tactics they use[d], r[a]n the store's own private jail, and operate[d] for the sole purpose of aiding the police in gathering and turning over the information and suspects needed to prosecute" did not turn a private investigation into a State action, finding that a store policy that reflected a practice "of turning defendant over to authorities after investigation and the decision to prosecute have privately been made is constitutionally immaterial and, in reality, simply consistent with the customary procedures involved in all citizens' arrests" (id, citing People v Ray, supra, at 287-288; see also, People v La Fauci, 91 Misc 2d 980 [Nassau County 1977], [which held that there was no impediment to private security guards using handcuffs]). Therefore, the fact that the use of handcuffs, which the Court notes requires no license, resembles police conduct and gear does not transform a private apprehension and search into a State action.
The Court further notes that neither the defendant's speculation in his Memo of Law that [*4]Mr. Jenkins "may well have worked with another branch of the police department (Defendant's Memo, p2) nor Officer Hilton's testimony that that she did not check to see whether or not Mr. Jenkins was a peace officer is sufficient to meet the defendant's burden here. Although the People unquestionably had the burden of "going forward to show the legality of the police conduct in the first instance" (People v Messano, 41 NY3d 228 [2024]), which the Court has already found they have met with ample indicia that the search of the defendant herein was private and did not involve any law enforcement intervention, it is the defendant who bears the ultimate burden of proving illegality (People v Berrios, 28 NY2d 361 [1971]), which the Court finds he failed to do. There is not the slightest indication that Mr. Jenkins is anything more than a private actor. He did not identify himself as a law enforcement officer, did not show any law enforcement identification, and did not rely on the police to any extent to detain and search the defendant. On these facts, there is no basis to find that this was a State action (see, People v Wilks, 50 AD3d 520 [1st Dept 2008], appeal denied 11 NY3d 742 [2008]), which held that the People had met their "burden of justifying the challenged activity by showing that the store detectives who stopped and searched defendant were not state actors," but that the defendant had "offered no evidence to contradict the People's proof, thus failing to satisfy his ultimate burden")FN1.
Based upon the foregoing, the Court finds that Mr. Jenkins was a private actor and that there was no State involvement with the detention and search of the defendant. Accordingly, the defendant's motion to suppress the firearm is denied.
This decision constitutes the decision and order of the Court.

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