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This chapter reviews the scientific evidence on the crime-prevention effectiveness of three major forms of public area surveillance: security guards, place managers, and defensible space. There is fairly strong and consistent evidence that the defensible-space technique of street closures or barricades is effective in preventing crime in inner-city neighborhoods. Security guards represent a promising technique of formal surveillance when implemented in car parks and targeted at vehicle crimes, although the surveillance technique of place managers appears to be of unknown effectiveness in preventing crime in public places.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, New York became engulfed in rising rates of crime and the belief among residents that navigating city streets was no longer safe. In reaction to the perceived inadequacies of governmental responses to crime, city-dwellers formed citizen patrols in which neighbors joined together to surveil their residential streets. Businesses and institutions also began to forge their own initiative to deter street crime by hiring private guards to patrol the streets of their districts. These efforts grew alongside one another and reinforced a similar logic about the need for private action against crime. Both helped to perpetuate and ultimately normalize the patrolling of public streets beyond the police. By the early 1980s, however, resident patrols slowly began to fade from the city, whereas the presence and role of private guards expanded, transforming the policing of city streets.

The British private security industry has posed major problems of quality assurance owing to the infiltration by criminal gangs into security provision. Many reputable firms felt that they were being undercut by disreputable ones, and that the poor reputation of the industry as a whole was depressing demand for its services. The Private Security Industry Act (2001) sought to address many of these issues. This chapter examines the impact of this Act on pay, levels of employment, and quality in the private security industry, with particular reference to two sectors: door supervisors and security guards. It recommends licensing the firms providing security instead of individual workers.

While real estate speculation differentiated Rajpura’s dispossessed farmers, this chapter shows that knowledge-intensive growth was so exclusionary for almost everyone that it made single-cropped agriculture and livestock rearing look attractive. Rajpura’s farmers lacked the requisite cultural capital for inclusion in the SEZ’s IT/ITES industry. A small minority received low-paying and insecure work as gardeners, security guards, janitors, and drivers through contractors. For almost no families did these jobs make up for lost agricultural assets. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and corporate social responsibility programs were ineffective substitutes for land, leaving many to wish they had it back. This non-labor-intensive and exclusionary growth helps to explain why ownership of even small agrarian assets—the semiproletarian condition—assumes such importance for farmers in contemporary India.

This chapter assesses the overwhelming task of building up Coast Guard security operations after the 9/11 attacks. A decade and a half later, the new captain of the port, Captain Michael Day said that the current culture of vigilance combined with an even stronger “unity of purpose and effort” than that which he extolled in 2001 have created a far safer port. Today's security systems are much more integrated across agencies than they were before. These important, although somewhat intangible, differences between then and now have also been reinforced by the very tangible reality of infrastructure. The Port of New York and New Jersey has received what Day called the “enabling mechanism of fairly robust port security grants.” Not only does the Coast Guard have better tools and equipment, it also has better systems in place for addressing security issues with a multiagency approach. And now, for the first time, there is an actual maritime evacuation plan.