Directed Readings in Criminal Justice:  Current Security Administration and Management

Instructor:  David R. Kent, M.S.,CPP
E-mail:  drkent@loyno.edu
Office:  Stallings 105
Office Phone: 865-2694
Dept. Phone:  865-3323
City College Phone:  865-3530
Off Campus Phone:  504-254-9997
Office Hours:  By appointment.  In addition, I will be available on campus before and after class, and during class
breaks.

Class Time/Location:  Monroe Library, first floor, Multimedia Room 2
 

DAY OF THE WEEK	MONTH/DATE	TIME
Friday	September 21, 2001	6 - 10pm
Saturday	September 22, 2001	9 am – 5 pm
Friday	October 19, 2001	6 - 10pm
Saturday	October 20, 2001	9 am – 5 pm
Friday	November 30, 2001	6 - 10pm
Saturday	December 1, 2001	9 am – 5 pm

ATTENDANCE:  Roll will be taken at the beginning and end of each class.  Issues, discussions, and student presentations require attendance at all scheduled class meetings.

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course will introduce business assets protection and loss prevention concepts into the overall crime prevention domain utilizing common private-sector security administration and management practices.  This crime-mitigation premise is known as "situational deterrence", and is based on a crime avoidance, benefit-denial and risk management model.  Most traditional crime prevention research and policy has largely been concerned with perpetrators and potential offenders.  Private enterprise, however, views crime risk matters in the economic context of lost profits and return on investment earnings.

    This course will introduce students to the diverse scope of private protection activities, including regulatory and licensure statutes which provide for private business uses of limited law enforcement powers and authority.  Private crime prevention and industrial security is an industry far larger than criminal justice in the USA, and potentially offers some broad opportunities for better public and private cooperation.

    With an elevated exposure to lethal workplace violence being the most common bond linking public safety and private security  practitioners, this course will explore a variety of assaultive risks and mortality ratios.  A natural outcome of working around crime and violence inevitably raises questions about arrest authority, use of force and every variety of legal involvement in both civil and criminal actions.  While commercial interests have traditionally been a barrier to serious and/or effective public-private cooperative efforts, technological advances, government contracts, special-event coverage and improvements in guard compensation and training all work to narrow the respect and confidence gap that separates the protective functions of public safety and private security.

    Law enforcement administrators frequently confront protection issues of deficient security guard training and performance, along with excessive false alarm calls, civil liability exposure and myriad relationship matters between private security and public police interests.  Security managers understandably  view police moonlighting as unfair competition in the business protection marketplace.

    This course will attempt to address these relational issues, along with a continuum of psychological, human and physical deterrence concepts, hardware and some technology applications.  We will look at a number of ethical, performance and legal issues that are common to situational applications of goal-directed protective and avoidance measures.

COURSE OBJECTIVES: At the successful conclusion of this course of instruction students will have acquired a broad appreciation and understanding of America’s dual systems of policing, and the shadow justice system that supports a huge private security industry.  Students should be equipped to:

1.   Identify and apply crime-avoidance techniques that are suitable to the threat level and the environment.
2.   Conceptualize and design common security measures.
3.    Utilize risk management principles in calculating the costs of potential losses and estimating recovery time and expenses    necessary to restore normal business functions.
4.   Formulate evaluation methods to assess loss exposure and performance levels of physical and human security practices.
5. Discern the various thresholds of deterrability and distinguish between random, opportunity and pre-meditated offenses.

Fischer, Robert J., Gion Green.  1998.  Introduction to Security, Sixth Edition, Butterworth-Heinemann, Boston, MA.  (Required text available in Loyola Bookstore)

Tunnell, Kenneth D.  1992.  Choosing Crime, The Criminal Calculus of Property Offenders, Nelson-Hall, Inc.  Chicago, IL.  (Required reading.  Out of print, however, at least one edition will remain on Reserve in the Library.  The Loyola Bookstore is trying to locate used copies of this text from Internet suppliers)

Sherman, Lawrence D., Denise Gottfredson, Doris MacKenzie, John Eck, Peter Reuter and Shawn Bushway.  Read only Chapter 7 , “Preventing Crime at Places”, by John Eck in Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn’t, What’s Promising. NCJ # 165366. (http://www.preventingcrime.org/report/chapter7.htm)

Smith, Mary S.  “Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design in Parking Facilities”.  National Institute of Justice, NIJ # 157310
(http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles/cptedpkg.pdf)
(Note:  PDF (Portable Document Format) files are created by Adobe Acrobat software and can only be viewed using the Adobe Acrobat Reader viewer. If you do not already have this viewer, you may download it at no cost from Adobe's Web site.  Just follow the instructions on the Adobe web page.)

Palmiotto, Michael J.  1997.  Policing - Concepts, Strategies and Current Issues in American Police Forces.  Carolina Academic Press, Durham, NC.  Chapter 4 only, p 79-107;

Kent, David R.  “Perceptual Deterrence - The founding Principle of Crime Prevention”.  1999.  Unpublished Paper.  (Or as a MS Word file)

Safety and Health Statistics, US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 1992 to present. (most current year)  Search US DOL Web Site (http://www.bls.gov/oshcfoi1.htm) and print only the two relevant tables that include cumulative:

(1) fatal injuries by event or exposure; and,
(2) assaults and other violent acts by major occupational classification that include public safety, police and private security employees.

GRADING SCALE:

A  =   95  –  100
B+ =  90  –    94
B  =   85  –   89
C+ = 80  –   84
C  =  75  –   79

CLASS PARTICIPATION:  Every student will conduct and prepare two research papers as described below under “Research Papers”.  A progress report to include the summarization of the student’s work to date will be delivered orally to the class, according to an agreed-upon schedule to be decided during our first weekend class meeting.  See details in the Research Papers heading.  Topics will be chosen from the following subjects:

RESEARCH Papers:  Two research papers are required for this course - an individual paper (Research Paper 1), and a class collaboration research undertaking (Research Paper 2).  These papers will be a minimum of ten pages in double-spaced, business letter typeface, no larger than you are currently reading (Size 12).  The cover page(s), end notes, appendices and bibliography will be extra and do not count in the ten page minimum.  No color or photo-copied pages are to be submitted.  All writing offered should be un-recycled, original copy, of and by the student providing the work.    Papers are to be stapled, without any covers or bindings.

Research Paper 1 - Topics can be chosen from the list above, however, you need to obtain approval of the instructor.  Instructor approval is necessary to achieve an optimal match between the researcher and their subject.  Ten (10) references different from those listed in "COURSE MATERIALS" are required.  Source materials will be responsive, properly attributed and recognizably authoritative security or criminal justice publications.  Not more than half of the references should be purely trade publications (i.e., Police Chief, Security Management, etc.).

Research Paper 2 -  In addition to basic academic research skills, the graduate students in this executive program are preparing themselves for senior public administration duties.  Working with peers, adversaries and subordinates on committee-type projects tend to be routine management responsibilities.  A mutual research effort is intended to challenge a variety of leadership skills and styles, and should insure the reasonable division of talent and labor among the class.

A tentative 50 page minimum length will be conditioned on class size and input.  Students will work on their own individual chapters, and are expected to carry an equitable share of reading and writing, and to make themselves available for periodic planning sessions with their class mates as/if needed.  Multiple progress reports will be elicited beginning the second weekend class session.

The topic of this paper is “Arrest”.  The theme should revolve around a security officer’s authority to effect an arrest in general, and specifically, their authority or absence thereof, to arrest for certain kinds of offenses, such as trespassing.

Louisiana law provides definitions and procedures for legal arrests.  Arrestees can quickly become plaintiffs against arresting officers for a variety of real and imagined tort actions.  Interestingly, there have been court decisions to the effect that an individual has a right to resist an illegal arrest.  Certain citizens are obligated to assist in an arrest when summoned by a peace officer.  Private, proprietary security officers are sometimes authorized to make arrests.  Police frequently ‘unarrest’ citizens when appropriate.  Mobile officers commonly detain drivers or passengers who may be handcuffed temporarily, and then released after things check out. Ordinary citizens can make arrests in some cases, even where there could be only the slightest expectation to realistically limit or control unruly behavior without employing implied and actual force.  To effect an arrest Federal law enforcement officers are permitted to fire at empty-handed, fleeing suspects, with their backs towards an agent.

This entire arena is just another moving target that confounds public safety practitioners and is a really important issue in the private security industry.  If court decisions are sometimes less than instructive to every-day criminal justice professionals, imagine the impact they have on private security trainers, guards and watchmen?

Prepare yourselves to discuss this subject in light of a joint-effort class project that will involve some legal research to ascertain various levels of arrest authority, to include civil exposure and actionable consequences of inadequate probable cause, a bungled apprehension, excessive force and other variables that can influence the act or process of properly arresting someone.

The class will necessarily have to allocate a division of labor in researching and reporting on different aspects of arrest, which will require the collective findings to be submitted in one sizable comprehensive report.  We will discuss how to best craft the outline of work as well as a uniformly prepared final report.  The class can help decide on how best to utilize the extensive skills and experience of its respective members.  Students will be expected to synthesize the various components into a cohesive final product.  In addition to the issues mentioned previously, my sense of these diverse aspects include, but are not limited to the following:

1.)    Civilian empowerment to effect a citizen’s arrest;
2.)    Commissioning citizens by law enforcement chiefs and sheriffs;
3.)    Constables, retired policemen and detention officers;
4.)    Contract security guards and private investigators;
5.)    The various statutes governing arrest authority;
6.)    LA State Boards of Private Investigators & Security Examiners;
7.)    Levee Boards, University Hospital, Bridge, Harbor & Airport;
8.)    Jurisdiction limit on ABC, LSP, AG, DOC, Wildlife & Parks;
9.)    Nuclear power company & strategic oil reserve police;
10.)  Bail enforcement agents and concealed/carry permitees;
11.)  Applicability of state statutes on federal enforcement;
12.)  Exclusive and/or concurrent federal & state jurisdiction;
13.)  Railroad police interstate enforcement authority & AMTRAK;
14.)  Various statutes controlling arrest authority in Louisiana;
15.)  A right or privilege to resist an illegal arrest.

CITY COLLEGE HOME PAGE  (http://www.loyno.edu/citycollege/)     LOYOLA UNIVERSITY HOME PAGE (http://www.loyno.edu)

The contents of this communication are the sole responsibility of David Kent and do not necessarily represent the opinions or policies of Loyola University New Orleans.

Copyright © 1996-2001 Loyola University New Orleans.