Proactive vs. Reactive Policing
One of the biggest differences between the services offered by traditional police forces and private security forces stems from the fact that police work is generally reactive, while private security forces are proactive. This fundamentally different approach to policing and security results in different emphases on prevention, investigation, and the relationship with the broader community. As a reactive force, police tend to deal with crime after the fact, whereas private security forces are designed to prevent crime via a system of risk management and proactive investigation.
Before seeing how this difference in emphasis affects the delivery of services, it will be useful to define the terms "reactive" and "proactive" a little more clearly, especially as they relate to police work. Reactive police work is that which responds to crime after the fact, so that the majority of the time police are only found at "scenes where a crime is threatened, is underway, or has just occurred" (Culbertson 2000, p. 13). The term "reactive" should not necessarily be taken as a pejorative, as it sometimes is in other contexts. Rather, it is simply descriptive, connoting police efforts which rely on 911 and dispatch, coupled with the widespread adoption of police cruisers and mobile communications technology, in order to effectively respond to reports of crime...
Thus, the majority of work done by patrol officers is highly reactive. This stands in contrast to "proactive" police work (and private security work, but that will be addressed later), which places an emphasis on stopping crime before it starts as well as aggressively seeking out criminal enterprises. This can take a variety of forms, ranging from "proactive, aggressive, military-style crime-fighting by what are called PPUs - police paramilitary units - within police departments," to "spend[ing] countless hours coaching little-league baseball teams, supervising activities at the local YMCA, speaking to high school kids about the dangers of drugs, escorting parades, unlocking car doors, and so on and on" (Culbertson, p. 14). Although these activities appear wildly disparate, the motivation and crime-fighting emphasis is the same: to prevent crimes before they occur, either by aggressively removing criminal elements from society or preemptively engaging at-risk populations. Although no effective crime-fighting or security force is entirely reactive or proactive, in general the police are a reactive organization, whereas private security forces, by definition, are largely proactive.
The most obvious result of mostly reactive police work is the emergence "of an incident-driven policing" where "people are considered as numbers, as 'cases', submerged in an…
