Academic and policy interest in policing during the last few decades has increas­ingly come to notice the role played by the private security industry. Initially much of this focus was upon charting the size of the sector, the functions that it per­formed, and its relation to the public police service.

Pluralisation of policing has increasingly been conceived in more complex ways than a private security–public police dichotomy. Loader suggested that this occurs by government, through government, above government, beyond government, and below government.

Although reliable estimates are hard to find, it seems that in many countries, the private security industry outnumbers the public police to a significant degree. The notion of the private sector as a junior partner, providing minor services that complement the public police, is increasingly outmoded as the private sector has proliferated and diversified.

The declining role of the state in the provision of goods and services to the public, partly due to fiscal constraints, has encouraged the private sector to develop. The growing importance of mass private property has created a context in which private policing arrangements have been preferred. Additionally, there has been a growing demand for private security.

In Britain the private security industry continues to be subject to only ‘light touch’ regulation. Until 2001 there was no statutory framework to license the sector. The 2001 Private Security Industry Act requires that individuals are vetted and allows for companies to be inspected.

The increasing importance of private sector ‘discipline’ within public sector policing has been noted. This has had an effect on budgets and management and seen some commercialisation of police work, as sponsors have been sought and police services have been ‘hired out’.

Pluralisation has meant also that a host of other agencies that have not traditionally had law enforcement or crime control responsibilities have come to be included in policing partnerships.

Describing these emerging patterns in terms of networks of policing, or networks for the governance of security, focuses attention on the changing character of police work, and not just on that a broader variety of actors are involved in delivery.

While few would doubt that private sector policing, and plural policing more generally, have become increasingly salient in policy and academic debate dur­ing recent years, there is less agreement about the extent to which this repre­sents a fundamental epochal shift in policing arrangements or something of a return to earlier patterns.

The association of pluralisation of policing with the growth in mass private property has led some to argue that modern policing arrangements have declined alongside the nation state that developed with them in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The emerging networks of plural agencies that deliver policing in broad terms amount to a qualitatively new environment.

Alternatively, others have noted that the plural policing identified in recent years is actually of long pedigree. Equally, the monopoly that the public police are held to have lost during this period was never as strong as is often suggested. Policing has always engaged diverse agencies, mixtures of public, private and voluntary provid­ers, organised and less organised, and using a host of strategies.