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Twenty years ago, according to the Rand report, half the nation's private guards bore arms on the job. Today, 10% or fewer do so. But that still leaves 100,000 gun-toting guards -- more than the combined police forces of the country's 30 largest cities. Yet weapons training for this army is generally skimpy. A recent survey found that eight hours was about average, and that a large part of the training consists of the mechanics of shooting rather than preparation for the real-life situations guards are likely to encounter. The survey also found that 40% of armed guards claim to be self-taught in the use of their weapons.
While most national firms say they provide about eight hours of basic training (mostly showing films) for unarmed guards, Wackenhut, the third largest guard vendor, boasts that its minimum has been 16 hours since the 1970s. Yet two former executives who recently left the firm insist that the real figure was far lower. "Four hours was pretty much it," says Frank Bisogno, who ran Wackenhut's New York City office until he left in 1989. "If you were required by the customer, you would do more. But if the manager could avoid expending a nonbillable cost such as that, he would avoid it."
Unfortunately, weak and piecemeal legislation enables many dubious practices to thrive. Only 17 states require guard companies to carry general liability insurance, and only 14 require any training for unarmed guards. Eighteen states have absolutely no training requirements -- even for those who carry guns -- and an astonishing 18 states allow convicted felons to be hired.
Some states restrict the access of guard companies to official criminal records, while others require fingerprint checks. In California nearly 20% of ! the applications for guard licenses are rejected each year because checks disclose prior criminal convictions. Yet even that kind of screening helps only to a degree. A 1989 study by the New York State Senate Committee on Crime and Correction found that 16% of guards were still hired despite such criminal backgrounds.
One key reason for the abundance of uniformed thugs is the inexcusable length of time it takes most states to check the fingerprints and report back to the security firms. Arizona and Arkansas, for example, can tell a company in less than two weeks whether it has just hired a Hillside Strangler (who, incidentally, worked for several private security firms after he had been rejected by some police departments). In Alaska and Oklahoma it can take six months for the same information. In states that do not scan the FBI's national data bank, such as New York, it is impossible to know whether a guard applicant committed a crime elsewhere.
To eliminate long lag times, some of the industry's better citizens are calling for direct access to FBI data banks. One major hurdle: California Congressman Don Edwards, the tough chairman of the House Civil and Constitutional Rights Subcommittee (and a former FBI agent himself), who vigorously opposes such access on privacy grounds. "It's a Catch-22," argues a top industry lawyer, Clifford Ingber. "Security is either going to be a meaningless service, or you have got to give companies greater latitude, as you do law enforcement, to allow them to screen their people."