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We are driving at speed through the green hills of rural Hertfordshire. Through the passenger seat window, large elegant houses flash by. Each front lawn is neat, each hedgerow well-kept. It looks like England from a storybook – but this part of the country is actually on the frontline of a relatively new (and some might say divisive) approach to crime prevention.

In the driver’s seat is Robert, a guard employed by Blueline Security. His car is painted with blue and yellow stripes, meaning it looks a lot like a police car. Inside there’s a walkie-talkie, a first-aid kit, and a Belgian Malinois dog called Bella (given similar training to a police dog, I’m told).

But Robert – who wears a bullet-proof vest and carries a pair of handcuffs – is careful to point out that he is not a real policeman.

“The more keen eye will realise that this isn’t a police car,” he says as he flicks his indicator. He points out that they follow the regulations on vehicle markings designed to distinguish police cars from other cars.

“But it looks similar enough where criminality will see it at a distance and think, ‘Let’s maybe not go there’.”

Blueline is one of a handful of “private policing” firms that have emerged in recent years. It has operated mostly in wealthy enclaves of southern England since 2019 and, for a fee, its team of ex-police or ex-army guards can patrol villages, looking for burglars and car thieves. Robert, in fact, spent 14 years working in the police force.

Various similar businesses have sprung up around the UK in recent years, including My Local Bobby, which was founded in 2016 and now has almost 150 security guards, as well as a fleet of cars.

According to some customers who spoke to the BBC, this fills a gap left by the real police, who they claim they no longer trust to turn up promptly to a 999 call in their villages.

To residents who can afford these firms, they are a “lifeline”, as one customer tells me. But to others, they represent an affront to the values on which British policing was founded; a step towards a country in which the wealthy get better access to law enforcement than the poor.

One former senior figure in the Metropolitan Police says she fears the emergence of a “two-tier society”.

So, with pressures on real police growing, is there room for private firms to help ease the load – or do so-called “private bobbies” blur the lines between police and profit?

The firms offering “private policing” that I’ve spoken to say that demand for their services has risen.

According to a paper published last year by criminologists from the universities of Sheffield and Brunel, the UK’s private security industry grew substantially between 2008 and 2021, with an increase in revenue and in the number of licensed security guards.

And, according to the Home Office, the number of real police officers in England and Wales fell most years from 2009 onwards, reaching a low of about 122,000 in 2017 – before ticking back up, to about 147,000 last year.

The study’s co-author, Dr Matteo Pazzona, a Senior Lecturer in Economics at Brunel University, describes a shift in policing from the “public to the private” realm. Whilst most UK security guards work in shops and other businesses, his data does also signal a rise in the sort of residential work carried out by private firms, he says.

There are lots of reasons why the security industry might have grown over this period. But David Spencer, a former Detective Chief Inspector at the Metropolitan Police, thinks that private firms could be filling the gaps left by police.

“If you’ve got money and you don’t feel that the police are effective, then it’s no surprise if you decide to use your resources to keep your family safe,” he says.

Until the 19th Century, protection from crime was largely a privilege enjoyed by the rich. Wealthy people employed “thief takers” to guard their property, whilst ordinary folk had to make do with volunteer watchmen, who focused on the more basic task of keeping order.

That changed when Sir Robert Peel, a Tory prime minister, started London’s Metropolitan Police – Britain’s first modern, professional force funded from general taxation.

He instilled in the force several principles that can still be reeled off from memory by many constables today: being visible in the community; treating members of the public equally, regardless of wealth or social standing – and perhaps more important than all: policing with trust.

Now, some worry that trust is being undermined.

Most burglaries and car thefts go unsolved. A YouGov survey from last month found that 50% of adults in Great Britain held “not very much confidence” or “no confidence at all” in their local force – up from 42% in 2019.

The government’s police inspector, Andy Cooke, said in a report in 2023 that confidence in police “hangs by a thread” (although his report last year noted some improvements).

Mr Spencer, who is now head of crime and justice for the centre-right Policy Exchange think tank, says demands on police time have risen dramatically. Online fraud has shot up in recent decades, and police have recognised the need to tackle issues that were once considered “private” (like domestic abuse and sexual violence). And police resources are failing to keep up pace, he says.

This, he thinks, helps explain the interest in so-called private police.

Laura (who didn’t want to share her full name) signed up for private security to patrol her road a few weeks ago, after a spate of burglaries in the area. She lives in rural Hertfordshire with her husband and one of her three children.

She already had CCTV installed and, on the night that her neighbour was burgled, it showed a gang of masked men sitting on her garden chairs. “You can see them looking at the camera, and they’ve seen it’s zoomed in on them. And then they went.”

Her neighbours held a meeting; about 40 households decided to subscribe to a private firm. Each pays £1,500 per year. In return, guards patrol the area daily. Laura says she can call a guard at any time.

“I don’t think we can afford to be confident that [the police] would get here in good time,” she says.

However, private guards have no more power than a member of the public. The aim for many is not to catch or restrain criminals but to act as a deterrent.

Jamie Strickland, a former soldier who founded Blueline, stresses that he does not regard his business as a replacement for the police and argues that even a perfectly-resourced force would struggle to reach remote areas of the countryside.

“The police can’t be everywhere all the time,” he adds.

But a spokesperson for the National Police Chiefs’ Council says they remain “resolutely committed” to attending the scene of crimes, and that all English and Welsh police forces now aim to attend a property following every burglary report.

They added that private firms “should not replace or supplement police and it is for properly trained officers to intervene when a crime has been committed”.

The question, though, is whether so-called private police firms signal the emergence of an unfair two-tier system, in which the wealthiest can pay to be better protected from crime.

This is a concern for Parm Sandhu, a former chief superintendent at the Metropolitan Police who left the force in 2019 and has since written a book about her experiences of prejudice.

“If you’re living on a council estate, you cannot afford to pay for policing,” she says. “Does that mean you deserve to be burgled, sexually assaulted, or mugged? No you don’t.”

She argues that the correlation between falling police numbers and an expanding private security industry signals something “totally wrong”.

Andy, who also lives in rural Hertfordshire, near Laura, and employs a private security firm, has his own feelings on this. “I look at it and say, ‘It’s £1,500 a year, I’m lucky I can find that,'” he says.

But he argues that not everyone who uses the service is wealthy. “You watch the CCTV [of burglaries], you feel worried for your family.” The expense, he adds, is worth it for that reason.

Still, doubts remain.

Ms Sandhu points out that the police-like appearance of some of these security firms could be confusing. “If you’ve got somebody who’s under the influence [of] drugs or alcohol, they will look up quickly and think, ‘Oh, this is a police officer’,” she says. “It’s really important to have that differential between police officers and security guards.

“Members of the public [could] go to them thinking they’re talking to police officers, and take their advice.”

Which raises the question of what, exactly, private guards can do. The companies I speak to are clear that their staff can restrain somebody they suspect to be a criminal, only in the same way that any member of the public can, a power commonly known as a “citizen’s arrest”.

And it comes with risk. Under English and Welsh law, a citizen’s arrest can only be used for an “indictable” offence – a serious crime tried at the Crown Court. You cannot use a citizen’s arrest for a lesser “summary” offence (tried at the magistrates’ court).

In the heat of the moment, it may be difficult for a guard to judge the difference – and if they get it wrong, they could be guilty of a crime themselves.

There are also questions about accountability. Police forces are inspected by the Government’s Inspectorate of Constabulary; if a serious complaint is made against a constable, it will be investigated by an independent regulator.

Few such tools of accountability exist for private firms – other than having their licence revoked by the Security Industry Authority.

But Martin Gill, a criminology professor and the director of Perpetuity Research, a security consultancy, points out that in shopping centres and hospitals, the “majority of policing is undertaken by private police forces” (in other words, security guards). Most of them, he argues, do a “very good job”.

In his view, when a private firm starts operating in a residential area, the local police force should engage.

The founder of My Local Bobby, David McKelvey, says he now has a “good relationship” with police forces, after a rocky start. “There was a lot of reticence [from the police] in the first place, but now they’re starting to see the benefit of [our service],” he claims.

He would like police to work closer with firms. “At the moment, there’s a reticence still within policing to sharing information [and] intelligence. Often that information is absolutely vital for us to do our job.”

The College of Policing has said police forces should only share intelligence under strict circumstances.

Ultimately, the sort of work carried out by ‘private bobbies’ is a tiny fraction of the real police work carried out across the country. But whether more residential communities will in future opt for the private model depends largely on whether the police are able to restore public confidence, says Mr Spencer of Policy Exchange.

“If it doesn’t, then I think it’s inevitable we will see more people […] turning to private providers,” he says.

Back on the road with Robert, midway through his patrol, his radio buzzes. A customer has called: a horse is loose and wandering in a country lane. Within minutes, he has driven there and helped return it to its field.

It’s not quite Starsky & Hutch, Robert concedes, but it’s an insight into the sort of work they do. And yet, he admits, there are limits.

He recalls one shift, on an April night this year, when he drove along a country road in his patch and saw a car that looked like it was being used for drug dealing.

“If they’ve had drugs and they’re behind a wheel, that’s a summary offence – I have no power to deal with it,” he says.

Instead, he sat in his car and called the real police.

Top image credit: Getty Images

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