On the practices of private security officers: Canadian security officers' reflections on training and legitimacy

With respect to empirical issues (as against the more theoretical concerns of Shearing and his coterie), perhaps the greatest critique of the "legitimacy" of private security officers has surrounded the paucity in many jurisdictions , especially North American ones, of formal training regimens for them, as against the extensive and well-known training requirements for public police officers. [...]the most urgent suggestion that researchers can gather from this study, despite its small sample size and exploratory nature, is the extreme importance of discerning what security officers do on the job and prioritizing those job activities as an analytic focus.