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OUTSOURCING OF PUBLIC SECURITY TASK
Anders Aaselund Høier
Legal and EU Policy Advisor EAGLE SHARK
The terror continues. It hardly makes any sense listing the individual attacks – they are familiar to us too well. We can only find that Europe is still very exposed. So, it becomes more relevant to ask if we are doing it right when it comes to prioritizing the resources. Can police resources be used in a more efficient way? In Denmark, burglary, drugs and violent crime are some of the criminal areas that the police forces in 2016 had to downgrade due to border controls, migration and increased terrorist efforts. By the end of February that year, for example, the capital police had approx.. 100,000, and nationally almost 520,000. The overtime in 2015 was at the end of the year attempted to be reduce through an overtime payment of 155 million DKK. However, the reduced 170,000 hours were back after the first few months of 2016.
We see a similar picture in many of Europe’s police forces.
It is not fair to the individual police officers and it is certainly not fair to the nation’s citizens.
But is overtime just a single case? No. The high level of terrorism and the migration to Europe is a fundamental task, but other forms of crime as well as the development of new complex ones do not stop for that reason. The tasks are increasing heavily and governments cannot keep up with such a pace. The time has come to find out what kind of tasks the police can and must solve and what operational tasks can be solved by specialized private suppliers. Monitoring, guarding, border control and investigation are tasks that a number of private companies have very strong prerequisites for solving or helping to resolve. With access to the best educated people with, among other things, police background, the necessary skills are very much present in these companies. Competences (and morals for that matter) that have not been devalued with one stroke because the police officer, investigator or elite soldier concerned switched to a private company.
When the speech falls on private security companies, it is often the substantive due process that appears. However, such issues can be significantly reduced or completely eliminated by better use of EU procurement rules and if the specific task is limited, cut in the right way and controlled by a contractual set up with ongoing follow-up and supplier management.
The debate is distorted and problematized unnecessarily when it is claimed that private security solutions lead to citizens being disadvantaged, that it would be difficult for the state to secure ownership of data, technical traces etc., that the education of private suppliers is worse etc. Similar conditions in other contexts are dealt with in many of the public tasks outsourced every year under EU procurement rules. Thus it has largely to do with the requirements set up by the contracting authority to the private supplier and which criteria that are crucial for the contract award. Many contracting authorities are fully able at handling such call for tenders and do so every day when outsourcing other public tasks.
Another factor highlighted is that national rules alone is inefficient and that it only makes sense addressing the private security industry through common rules at EU level. In July 2017 the European Parliament called on the Commission to come up with a regulatory framework for private security companies, recognizing the important role of Europe’s 40,000 private security companies and 1,5 million employees when it comes to closing capacity holes created by situations such as terror and migration that require extra presence of police and military. Now there is no excuse. Such an initiative should be backed by EU Member States. It concerns our common European security.
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