Private Security Law: Case Studies

by David A. Maxwell

Book Overview

Private Security Law: Case Studies is uniquely designed for the special needs of private security practitioners, students, and instructors. Part One of the book encompasses negligence, intentional torts, agency contracts, alarms, and damages. Part Two covers authority of the private citizen, deprivation of rights, and entrapment.The factual cases presented in this book touch on the everyday duties of persons associated with the private security industry...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0750690348
• ISBN13: 9780750690348
• Release Date: November 1992
• Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann
• Length: 472 Pages
• Weight: 1.89 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

K-Mart Law (i.e. The Rentacop's Bible)

According to editor David A. Maxwell, the role of subsidized law enforcement is becoming increasingly supplanted by private security personnel (primarily as a result of municipal tax dollars spreading too thin, but also as a buffer to litigation from citizens injured and/or victimized on private property), and as a result, the criminal justice system will be forced to engineer new legal paradigms to control these corporate spaces, what with our "public" environments becoming increasingly privatized (shopping malls, apartment buildings, condominiums, retail outlets, hotels, bars, restaurants, casinos, health care institutions), a postmodern Main Street, fragmented and decentralized. What the industry needs (and what Maxwell provides) are a series of discourses that explore these new legal dangers and issues of accountability, providing a code of ethics for underpaid, underrespected "rentacops" who nevertheless find themselves bearing the brunt of municipal police functionality, badge-wearing "civilians" with limited arrest and investigatory powers.Maxwell provides a brilliantly edited anthology of case studies designed for the security manager, but generally used as a supplemental text in university courses on security administration. Recently, however, many professors have realized that merely technical excurses on the security industry tend mainly to put their students to sleep, while oversimplifying the civic answerability issues (i.e. a litigation-happy American society) which haunt every rentacop comptroller (not to mention the citizens who are routinely victimized by poor training, negligent hiring, and cost-cutting managerial tactics). Maxwell's book (and others like it) are rapidly becoming the required text in progressive courses on the subject, useful not only for those working in the industry, but also the network of lawyers, policeman, magistrates, and even potential litigants who routinely come into contact with security officers.It is perhaps no accident that Maxwell's selected cases are often highly entertaining in their own right, exploring the legal vicissitudes of some truly bizarre and, at times, unbelievable scenarios. Granted, most of the cases involve the usual synopses of simple negligence, intentional torts, vicarious liability, contract law, false arrest, illegal detention, invasion of privacy, entrapment, et al. But beneath it all, Maxwell's editorial sense of humor keeps a devilish grin on the reader's face, many of the cases giving off that whiff of seedy, voyeuristic pleasure we usually associate with "reality" shows on the Fox network.Remember Butterfly McQueen, the Oscar-nominated actress who played Scarlett O'Hara's squeaky-voiced handmaid back in 1939? Well, in her elderly years she had a disastrous run-in a pair of overzealous security guards, who literally *karate-chopped* her to the floor of a Greyhound bus terminal because they "thought she was stealing" (Int. Sec. Corp. of Virginia v. McQueen, pgs. 185-7