The Thin Purple Line

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_Universal

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guard_labor

The job was mostly consistent with this article, which was well-written and humanizing for the workers, if not necessarily endearing them to us.

I’m glad I had the experience. I got to see a lot of niche trade shows and conventions from setup to tear down which I never would have thought to attend otherwise, as well as see how lading workers made it all happen behind the scenes.

One time I arrived at what I thought was to be a normal shift at a women’s leadership conference to be pulled aside by my boss, who told me in unambiguous terms that the First Lady would be dropping by for a speech, and I would be working a door opposite an eminently large and in charge Secret Service agent, who I’ll charitably say didn’t need me but as I was one of a only a few of my company’s event security for that particular event, we essentially acted as liaisons between the event/house security and the public. Beyond that point was authorized access only, which did not include our staff, as we were not necessary.

Another notable incident involved a conference for the American Psychiatric Association, protesters from the Church of Scientology, and actual, literal, capital-A Anonymous counter-protesters in Guy Fawkes masks.

It was just the CoS at first, and then someone must have said something on Twitter or something, because suddenly there was a flash mob of CoS outnumbered by Anons roughly 2:1, with around 50-75 participants if I had to guess. All while we have a strait-laced normie psych con going on.

We had to lockdown the center, locking all exterior public entry doors, move badge checks outside temporarily, and threw up some barricades at the sidewalk to provide a buffer zone between the sidewalk and the center entrance. The whole thing probably lasted a couple hours or less, but it was probably the most San Francisco thing I experienced at that particular job.

I even asked Aubrey Cottle about it when he did a Reddit AMA, and he seemed to be a least familiar with the occurrence:

https://old.reddit.com/r/anonymous/comments/iclxtc/comment/g...

Stay safe, HN.

rather strange trip to see the same arrive in the us

I was glad to read that the author had to do some walking as part of the job as it sounded like he would have benefited from the exercise, yet even that didn't seem to soften his aspirational contempt for people who do physical work.

The one thing I would advocate for in the private security business would be fitness standards as that sets a bar for some basic competence that would add a dynamic with more dignity and respect in the role. Even though I would agree the whole job is the living symbol of policy failures and naive sentimental politics, if there's a bet to make on growth, managing the consequences of those failures seems like an unlimited opportunity.

ugh. spurious reasoning

When areas or situations are unsafe people must make compensating behaviors to protect themselves because nothing else will protect them. They don't go out at night, they don't go out alone, they avoid looking like they have valuables, they especially don't go out at night alone with valuables while being a woman. They take longer routes to avoid worse places, they don't make eye contact. They carry weapons. They change to the other side of the street.

The effect of these compensating behaviors is that the recorded rates of crime go down and can continue to drop even as the level of safety and imposition on people's lives goes up. In that case they're not more safe, they're less, but they're not relying on the people whos crime stats we look to for as much protection as they did... which brings me to:

Another reason drawing this connection can be fallacious is because in areas of persistently high crime people don't report it because law enforcement will not do anything about it (or won't even take a report). Exceptional events are worth reporting but when a kind of crime is common it's not an exception, reporting is just a waste of time for everyone involved. Again, reported crime can go down while crime is going up.

Yet another reason why these figures can be misleading is because the nature of the crimes can change. In one location most shootings may at one point have been drug dealers shooting each other in turf wars, but later they begin shooting uninvolved residents as part of robberies. While its terrible that anyone is getting shot, criminals shooting each other is rightfully less of a concern because it has the obvious personal mitigation of not being involved in the illicit drug trade (for this example...). So yet another reason why you can hear from people that they are less safe even when the stats say crime is decreasing-- essentially simpsons paradox: the way you aggregate or disaggreate data can swap the direction of a trend. No person experiences the population's crime rate, each person experiences their own crime rate.

And sure there are also plenty of effects in the other direction too-- the 24 hour news cycle, open records laws, social media feeds, ubiqitous cameras-- all making some people feel like they're in the middle of a warzone even when they're perfectly safe. But the existence of biases in one direction doesn't make the other not exist. And for some people and places the net bias may be one way while for other people and places its another.