Security State: They’re everywhere!

Security State.

They’re everywhere!

I’m not talking about the homeless, or migrants abandoned on the streets of our cities by immigration officials, or even billboards for cannabis.

No, I’m talking about the ever-present…security guard.

When I was a kid growing up in California in the 1970s, you MIGHT see a security guard at the bank.

By the 1990s they started turning up at concerts, sporting events, even street fairs.  Mostly to intervene if things “got out of hand” (that is, drunks or gangbangers or drunk gangbangers started fighting).

Now they are not only ubiquitous, but liable to turn up at the mostly unlikely places:  the library, the supermarket, movie theaters, parking lots, hotel lobbies. 

Even more striking is that they have seemingly become indispensable. In fact, as reported by KQED, San Francisco librarians are rallying in the streets to demand more security guards.

“I am a librarian[;] I am a branch manager—I am not a policewoman[;] I am not a security guard,” said Nicole Germain, president of the Library Guild.

She’s referring the fact that the state’s libraries have become daycares for the dysfunctional.  Germain said that on one occasion, she had to intervene when a half-naked man threatened a group of preschoolers.

And it’s not just the Main Library adjacent to the Civic Center (San Francisco’s Civic Center being the epicenter of dysfunction in the Golden State). Eight of the city’s 28 public libraries have at least one security guard.  I can vouch that there is even a security guard at my library, far from San Francisco and deep in the supposedly civilized suburbs.

The necessity of the security guard is in part economic. In many instances they are doing work that would previously have been done by a police officer. It’s a lot cheaper to pay someone minimum wage to do more or less the same work. And there’s no pension to fund. And they also serve as ersatz ticket takers, direction givers, traffic directors, and question answerers.

Unfortunately, very few of them look as if they could handle an emergency of any significance. As with so many other aspects of American life, they are simply for show—to provide the appearance of safety.  And if there’s a lawsuit, well, we had security (“due diligence” they call it).

One doesn’t have to be an especially keen observer of the passing scene to conclude that this is not a sign of a healthy society. Decency, civility, public order have so broken down in California that the state is at the mercy of a few people with no real expertise or aptitude to maintain some semblance of lawfulness.

I don’t know about you, but there is nothing that makes me feel less secure than the presence of a security guard, some of whom are downright scary themselves.  

California was a better place when only the banks had security guards and the worst thing that could happen at the library was a stern “Shush!” from the librarian.