David, 26, is shoplifting peanut butter from the Stadium Shopping Center in Portland, Ore. He has been living on the streets for about a month. Already addicted to heroin, he had started using fentanyl four days earlier. The store’s personnel spot him and call their private security firm Echelon Protective Services. They know that if they call the police, they might have to wait up to two hours. And this situation needs to be dealt with right away. The shopping center’s management pays Echelon to patrol the area at all times.
The guards turn up within minutes and apprehend the shoplifter. What should they do next? They can wait for the police. But that would be a waste of time. Even if the police did arrest the shoplifter, he would be back on the streets shortly. The local DA isn’t going to prosecute this kind of low-level shoplifting.
What Echelon’s guards do instead is talk to the man. “We come in there and say, ‘Look, I’m your life associate. I’m your friend,’” says Alex Stone, founder of Echelon. The guards spend an hour just getting to know David. They notice he has luggage with him that appears to be valuable, maybe even worth $1,000. He must have a family somewhere.
They ask David for his full name and send it back to Echelon’s in-house private investigator. It doesn’t take long for the PI to turn up a missing person’s report from Pennsylvania. Echelon contacts the man’s family, who confirm that he is their missing son.
The guards don’t leave David at any point. They persuade him to stay the night at a hotel, paid for by a nonprofit program that provides vouchers. “That’s a good approach to getting someone into a shelter long term, by letting them feel what it’s like to have a roof over their head and be somewhere safe where they can lock the door,” says Stone.
But David doesn’t go into a shelter the next day. He goes home to Pennsylvania and enters treatment for drug addiction.
Even though his journey home started with him being apprehended for shoplifting, at no point did the police or any other government agency get involved.
If you think Echelon sounds more like a social-work agency than a private-security firm, you are right. As policing recedes in Portland and other cities, private-security firms are stepping into the gap. But they are using novel methods adapted to a legal and political situation that prizes social-service solutions over apprehension and punishment.
During the summer of 2020, downtown Portland was rocked by demonstrations—which frequently became violent. In response to calls to “defund the police,” the city government cut $15 million from the department’s budget. Portland Police Bureau officers fled. “We have lost a grand total of 244 sworn personnel since July 2020,” says Sgt. Kevin Allen.
“Portland’s homicide rate rose 207 percent.”
According to one study, Portland’s homicide rate rose 207 percent from January 2019 through June 2021—one of the largest increases of any city in America during those violent months. In 2022, Portland’s homicide rate crossed 100 for the first time in the city’s history.
As crime has risen and policing has declined, residents and businesses have hired private security. In this respect, Portland is representative of a nationwide trend. In Los Angeles, the Beverly Hills Chamber of Commerce hired two private-security firms to combat crime. In Baltimore, the Federal Hill neighborhood started a security patrol funded by annual contributions of $300 from residents. In Atlanta, the Buckhead neighborhood is hiring private security through its Community Improvement District. In Minneapolis, the private-security firm Unparalleled Security was founded in the wake of the George Floyd riots in summer 2020. Within two years, it had grown to 175 employees. According to the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a little more than 1 million Americans work as security guards.
Much of the growth in private security is driven by small, local firms that adapt their services to the unique dynamics of their city. These firms rely on relationships with local stakeholders. In cities where the police department is still relatively functional, private-security firms tend to work closely with them. Under this model, called “observe and report,” security firms identify problems and seek police intervention. They are an informal extension of the criminal-justice system.
But in Portland, police don’t come when you call. Steve Carmack, who runs the Portland operations of Premier Security, encountered this situation at a hotel where his company provides security. A homeless man was in the lobby yelling and threatening the staff. Carmack managed to get the man outside and called the police, but the man refused to leave. “I’m holding him off outside, and he’s ranting and raving, trying to get in,” he told me. Two and a half hours passed before the police showed up.
Events like this illustrate how the observe-and-report model” has broken down in Portland. Firms have to figure out ways to provide security without police intervention. Front and center is the question of how to handle Portland’s special challenge: its large homeless community. In 2019, there were 4,015 homeless people in the Portland metro area, but in 2022 that number rose to 5,228, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. That means Portland has more homeless people than San Francisco.
Much of the homeless population is conc
