The private security industry in Belgium (1907-1940): present-day reflections on historical shifts in the provision of security

The focus of this research lies on the historical development and criminological significance of the private security industry in Belgium in the first third of the twentieth century. To that end, the aim of this paper is threefold. First, to understand the underlying historical mechanisms that shaped the development of an early twentieth century Belgian security market. The second aim is to analyse and explain the nature and role of the discussed non-state security providers alongside and in relation to their public counterparts. Third and finally, to challenge the alleged historical discontinuity in private initiatives in surveillance and protection and by doing so, reveal the explanatory value of the historical perspective for current trends in the area of policing. For this study, empirical data was collected through archival research in organisations directly and indirectly involved in (private) policing and security – e.g. private security companies, local and judicial authorities, the Chamber of Commerce, maritime, business and industrial interest parties, etc.
Following a thorough analysis of the collected data, we argue that a specific but complex set of societal conditions and transformations, which are discussed in the paper, accelerated the establishment of a rapidly expanding private security industry. Already at the beginning of the previous century, this industry functioned as a specialist provider of a wide and fast-growing range of manned guarding and security services in maritime, industrial, commercial and urban residential areas in Belgium. Consequently, the public authorities witnessed the emergence of a private sector operating at the core of (preventive) policing, calling into question the assumed state monopoly over crime control. In this process, however, the state tried to reconfirm its exclusive right to determine who may guarantee security and to what end. By putting our results in perspective with the present-day governance of policing, we believe that the historical roots of Belgium’s late modern private security industry are to be found in the establishment of a number of private policing companies at the beginning of the twentieth century. They marked, especially in terms of their activities, professional and commercial characteristics and modi operandi, a symbolic shift in the (private) provision of security, furthermore demonstrating that by this time policing was already undertaken by multiple public and private agencies, both in complementary and competitive configurations.