Standardisation of pre-assignment training, certification requirements, and in- service training, is necessary. Industry minimum standards in terms of selection, training, and supervision of security personnel should be identified and enforced in order to increase the professionalism of the sector generally.
Topics that may be addressed in basic training include, the role of security officers and their legal powers and limitations, communications and report writing, public and client relations and customer service, diversity, and ethics and conduct. Other issues may include, emergency and disaster management, access control, safety and hazardous materials and other topics specific to certain sectors.
Further in-house training and refresher courses should be encouraged, as well as special training for private security supervisors.
A record of the training, reflecting when an employee received training, what that training consisted of, and the form of testing and its results, should appear in the employee's personnel file. In the event of a subsequent critical incident, this documentation enables the company to demonstrate how employees were trained to follow policies and procedures. In addition to helping to raise minimum standards, this practice could also help to limit the company’s liability for any misconduct by an employee.
Ethics training is especially important here, since security workers often have access to confidential information and have opportunities to commit unethical behaviour (theft). One way to do this could be through a system of 'formalised peer sanctions' – i.e. internal scrutiny.
An industry code of ethics, standards of professional conduct, identification of criteria for admission of new members, establishment of mechanisms to hear, investigate and clear/sanction complaints against members for sub-standard performance or misconduct should be established. There should be a code of ethics for private security employees, and a similar but separate code for private security management.
Limitations on what private security officers are entitled to do
The limitations of PSCs' ability to intervene and interfere in the public sphere should be clearly delineated, with three key issues addressed:
a) Search, and seizure (searching a person’s property without consent, searching a suspect's person without his or her consent);
b) Use of necessary force to restrain an individual until police are called;and,
c) Types of weapons and firearms PSCs can carry (if any) and how they may be used.
PSCs are automatically subject to the European Convention on Human Rights, but confusion regarding their powers can lead private individuals to assume – in a Pavlovian response to uniforms or other visible markers of similarities to public police – that PSCs are police or other law enforcement agents. Clear limitations on the supposed powers of PSCs should be outlined in order to inform the public as much as to regulate the industry itself.
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