Private Security and the Modern State

Historical and Comparative Perspectives

David Churchill, Dolores Janiewski, Pieter Leloup

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429590450
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Based on extensive research in several international contexts, this volume provides a nuanced assessment of the historical evolution of private security and its fluid, contested and mutually constitutive relationship with state agencies, public policing and the criminal justice system.

This book provides an overview of the history of private security provision in its multiple forms including detective agencies, insurance companies, moral campaigners, employers' associations, paramilitary organizations, self-protection and vigilantism. It also explores the historical evolution of private policing and security provision in a diverse set of temporal, national and international contexts and compares the interactions between public and private security bodies, structures, strategies and practices in different countries, cultures and settings. In doing so, the volume fills the existing gaps in historical knowledge about the emergence of private and public security organizations and provides a more robust understanding of changes in the division of responsibility for security provision, law enforcement and punishment between public and private institutions.

This wide-ranging volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of history, criminology, sociology, political science, international relations, security studies, surveillance studies, policing, criminal justice and law.

Part 1
Security regimes in national context

1
Undercover policing and state power in the United States and France from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century

Jacqueline E. Ross

Undercover tactics have played a central state-building role in both the United States and France, but in each country they have done so in very different ways and to very different effect. In France, infiltration was a tactic by which the national state sought to consolidate its power and to extend its administrative reach from the reign of Louis XIV into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the same time, it was a tactic that the French state jealously guarded and sought to deny to private sector detectives, even as the state privileged high-policing of potential political opponents over the crime-fighting uses of undercover tactics. In a context of almost constant political turmoil, national concerns about stability crowded out local law enforcement competition for scarce undercover resources that mayors wanted to deploy against ordinary criminals. In the United States, by contrast, undercover tactics originated outside the state, as a private self-help stratagem through which private detective agencies and large corporations compensated for the absence of a powerful state enforcement apparatus by developing their own undercover tactics to suppress the labour movement and to protect their far-flung holdings from thieves inside their organizations and rural outlaw gangs of the Midwest and Western frontier. The United States never aspired to a monopoly of legitimate stealth at any level of government, whether local, state, or federal. This in turn allowed such tactics to thrive and encourage ever more aggressive competitive uses of undercover operations inside and outside of American government.

This chapter draws in part on the memoirs of French and American detectives to illuminate the distinctive roles undercover investigations played in the state-building process of each country. Focusing particularly on the nineteenth century, I contend that French undercover tactics served, first and foremost, as a means by which an embattled central state asserted top-down control over groups and individuals whom its successive regimes viewed as threats to their authority. Though local authorities in France also sought to use undercover agents to fight crime, the national state deflected scarce resources to the political uses of surveillance, while viewing the private resort to undercover tactics as a usurpation of the state’s sovereign prerogatives, especially when such tactics were used to solve crimes. If political uses of infiltration triumphed over crime-fighting resort to undercover agents in France, however, American proponents of undercover tactics – both inside and outside of government – found it useful to deploy undercover tactics in ways that blurred the distinction between crime-fighting, political policing, and the suppression of organized labour – a confusion made possible by the prominent role of the private sector in serving each of these aims.

As John Walton and Dominique Kalifa have argued for the United States and France, respectively, detective memoirs and fiction emerged as popular nineteenth-century genres by which criminal investigators, both public and private, sought to advertise and to legitimate an emerging profession.¹ These can certainly not be accepted uncritically as accurate portrayals of the day-to-day work of private and public detectives. Precisely because the authors are primarily concerned with promoting themselves and their investigative methods, however, the memoirs reveal a great deal about how acceptable they expected undercover tactics to be to their audience and how central they believed undercover tactics to be to their emerging profession. Such tactics turned out to feature much more prominently in American than in French memoirs of private detectives. The hesitation of French private detectives to describe their own undercover exploits may reflect the greater legal risks private detectives in France faced when they used tactics that challenged the French state’s effort to assert a monopoly of legitimate stealth.

The multiplicity of uses to which Americans put undercover tactics owes a great deal to the private sector origins of the technique. In the United States, undercover investigations did not originate with the state. Instead, competing elites developed such tactics to bypass and eventually to commandeer government, as political and social elites built their own enforcement capacity through private detective agencies, reform societies, and other moral entrepreneurs – all of whom used undercover agents to do what the state could or would not do. Undercover tactics allowed social, political, and economic rivals to promote their own enforcement agendas and, eventually, to shape the enforcement agendas of local, state, and federal authorities. Public authorities eventually emulated and adopted the undercover tactics that had been pioneered by private sector actors, making such investigative techniques central to crime-fighting, vice enforcement, union-busting, and political surveillance alike. In France, undercover tactics had no comparable role to play in the capture of the state by private interests. Instead, undercover investigations enabled the national state to establish its investigative primacy over private interests, mayors, and other local political elites. If undercover tactics served as an engine of centralized state power in France, they functioned as a motor of decentralized and contested social control between competing private and public elites while contributing to a fragmented American state.

The public and private surveillance sectors in the US

Though the French state, in the nineteenth century, had a more powerful law enforcement apparatus than the United States, the instability of successive French regimes provided political authorities with a powerful incentive to expand their use of infiltration to monitor potential political enemies, deny such powers to the private sector, and prioritize political surveillance over the crime-fighting uses of infiltration. By comparison, the US government was significantly more stable, at least until the advent of the Civil War, despite a much less developed administrative apparatus. The stability of the federal government allowed the US to do without the surveillance capacity of the French state and gave the federal government less reason to view private surveillance capacities as a threat to its survival. Instead, what the founders feared when they observed the French example was the tyranny of state surveillance. Less anxious about the private sector and more suspicious of a centralized state, no level of government in the nineteenth-century United States possessed or even aspired to a monopoly of legitimate stealth. Undercover tactics were not the exclusive preserve of the state, nor was the state even a major protagonist in the use of undercover tactics for most of the nineteenth century.

American undercover practices thus have a unique background as a self-help remedy that originated in the private sector to advance interests that the public police were not capable of serving effectively. In the nineteenth-century United States, public policing was underdeveloped in the West, fragmented in the cities, and primarily centred on maintaining a visible patrol presence rather than crime-fighting.² These limited state policing powers allowed private investigators to flourish and eventually to shape the investigative methods of the police to conform with the undercover tactics favoured by private detectives.

First developed in the 1830s, American undercover tactics were expanded by Allan Pinkerton in 1855 to serve as a tool of large business interests in the rural Midwest and on the Western frontier. Pinkerton used such tactics to investigate what Lawrence Friedman has called ‘crimes of mobility’ – swindling, embezzlement, and the like – which accompanied Western expansion.³ Gangs of outlaws and railroad employees stole from shipments of gold bullion and cash. In the 1860s and 1870s, robbers and thieves moved on from robbing stage coaches to robbing trains. Express companies, cattle speculators, railroads, mining companies, and insurance companies hired private detectives to track down fugitives and to infiltrate outlaw gangs.⁴

Relationships between private detectives and public police were at their closest on the sparsely policed Western frontier. Local government officials had limited territorial jurisdiction, while private detectives working for large companies could travel all over. Accordingly, Wells Fargo deployed private detective Fred Dodge to pose as a gambler in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881. Dodge investigated hold-ups, rode posse with the sheriff, and reported to Wells Fargo President John J. Valentine personally about the integrity of other Wells Fargo employees who over-saw sizeable shipments of gold and cash.⁵ Though he served a private employer, Dodge sporadically worked as a constable. In a sense, being a lawman became his cover, though his undercover work for Wells Fargo and his law enforcement duties coalesced as Dodge befriended rustlers and outlaw gangs, gathering evidence that could be used to indict them for theft of Wells Fargo shipments.⁶ Indeed, private interests sometimes hired law enforcement officers to work on their behalf, as Dodge did when he hired Sheriff Wyatt Earp to guard gold bullion for the firm.⁷

A variety of institutional interests found undercover private eyes useful, including those of American prosecutors, who, unlike their French counterparts, could not call on judicial police to carry out investigative tasks. In the late 1880s, for example, District Attorney Kalter Skoll hired a Pinkerton detective to pose as an outlaw to track and capture a deputy sheriff’s killer.⁸ In some cities, private detectives thrived precisely because they built alliances with local reformers to combat or circumvent police corruption, which could require undercover tactics. A local prosecuting attorney worked closely with private detective Thomas Furlong to shut down local gambling dens that were bribing the police to stay open. Furlong used undercover agents to gather evidence and raid the gambling operations instead of the recalcitrant police.⁹

It was not only large businesses and prosecutors who hired private detectives but other private parties as well, who could not rely on the criminal justice system to solve crimes and punish the guilty. A law firm, for example, hired Pinker-ton agents to conduct an undercover investigation of swindlers who sold them a worthless silver mine to secure evidence for a civil lawsuit in hopes of a favourable settlement.¹⁰ Crime victims’ families sometimes hired Charlie Siringo to advise them on whether it was pursuing a criminal prosecution. For this kind of intelligence, undercover tactics were essential. After Siringo solved the kidnaping and murder of a prominent mine owner’s son, the mine owner hired Siringo to investigate the likelihood of securing a conviction at trial. He concluded that no jury would convict the defendant, despite the strength of the evidence, because most local residents likely to be called up for jury duty were related to him by blood or marriage and were hostile to the victim himself and the client.¹¹

Private detectives like Furlong illustrate the circulation of undercover tactics between the public and the private sectors and the osmotic influence of private sector undercover tactics on public policing. Furlong spent most of his 50-year career as a railroad detective in Missouri and Pennsylvania, starting in 1862. His long career also included a shorter stint as police chief of Oil City, Missouri, in 1872, drawing on the skills he had acquired in the private sector and making the same liberal use of undercover tactics that he had when he worked for the railroads. Undercover tactics figured prominently in his account of his exploits investigating crimes ranging from theft and swindling to vandalism, arson, and murder. When an informant tipped him off about the planned robbery of a railway car, Furlong allowed the informant to supply the conspirators with ‘a team and conveyance’ with which to take the would-be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1 Security regimes in national context
• PART 2 Techniques and cultures of private security
• PART 3 Between public and private security
• Conclusion
• Index