International Journal on Criminology Volume 4, Number 2, Winter 2016 | Page 98
International Journal on Criminology
suggested putting pressure on private groups to provide their own security by calling
upon private operators. In March 2016, representatives of police unions questioned
by the commission of inquiry into the November 2015 attacks confirmed their wish
to “entrust certain areas of control to private security”. 1 The responsibility therefore
laywith companies to protect them against the terrorist threat. But how were they to
do that?
In fact, it is now rare for any kind of organization not to have a department in
charge of its safety. Depending on its size, its exposure or the sensitive nature of its
business, this responsibility may be given to a team, a single employee or partially or
totally outsourced. The tasks which fall to the “safety” team may be clearly defined or
… very vague, as safety often covers very diverse realities. As well as the traditional
fight against fire and other forms of accidental danger, these professionals may also be
in charge of safeguarding personnel, protecting the organization against theft, attacks,
and more generally any sort of malicious action. It is this latter activity which we
shall call “security” in this article. Safety and security are closely related ideas, often
confused outside the world of practitioners who are in any case not all in agreement
on the truth of this distinction and therefore on its usefulness. When we talk about
safety and security, what do we mean? Is there a fundamental difference between
these two notions? If this difference does indeed exist, what are the organizational and
managerial consequences?
French law uses the two notions in an undifferentiated and sometimes confused
manner (Delvolve 2011) as, for that matter, do French businesses (Juillet, Hassid, and
Pellerin 2012). For if the words have a meaning, organizations do not necessarily
take it into account and the use of the two terms, without any real distinction being
made between them, is common: there are managers of (or people in charge of)
safety, security, and sometimes both. Moreover, in a professional environment largely
dominated by the English language, the confusion is aggravated by the fact that the
English words “safety” and “security” stand for the exact opposite of the similarlooking
French words: French “sûreté” is English “security” and French “sécurité” is
English “safety”.
The aim of this article is to show that, under the influence of a specific and
evolving environment, organizations have no choice but to entrust to private services
responsibility for taking care of their security as we define it above, to the exclusion
of any other activity, and in particular of safety. In doing so, we propose to show that
a new function is in the course of being institutionalized in major French companies.
From a methodological point of view, we will attempt to analyze the emergence of
the phenomenon by a chronological review of the literature on the subject. We will
then define the institutionalization which is taking place in a quantitative manner,
1
Le Monde of March 24, 2016—http://www.lemonde.fr/police-justice/article/2016/03/24/attentats-les-policiers-veulent-encore-renforcer-leur-armement_4889353_1653578.html
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