Today in the Washington Post, "The Private Arm of the Law" caught my attention. The article discusses the privitization of the police, or the rise of private security firms, which have apparently outnumbered public police forces in the United States since the 1980s.

With the sleeve patch on his black shirt, the 9mm gun on his hip and the blue light on his patrol car, he looked like an ordinary police officer as he stopped the car on a Friday night last month. Watt works, though, for a business called Capitol Special Police. It is one of dozens of private security companies given police powers by the state of North Carolina -- and part of a pattern across the United States in which public safety is shifting into private hands.

As a pattern of activity, the privatization of security forces in the context of international politics is apparent too. Companies like Blackwater USA represent and effectively help sustain a transnational marketplace for force and violence. You can see a good example at YouTube.

Since the 1950s and the institutionalization of civil defense, this pattern of privitization is also apparent in everyday family relations. Family and national security has gradually been off loaded onto the individual person. Thus, as privite citizens we go out and purchase a $3,000 bombshelter or more recently, duct tape and plastic.

So, generally, we might say that a pattern can be discerned, where security is privitized; that is, shifted away from the state and recentered on the individual person and the individual corporate entity.