Would You Say You Did the Right Thing? Recollections on Witnessing a Suicide from the Perspectives of Two Security Officers

Abstract

This paper adds to the under-researched topic of the work practices of private security officers with analyses of narratives that two security officers produce while discussing the same tragic event: a suicide that took place at the mall where both were employed. The narratives are distinctive not only because of the topic they recount, but also because of the perspective each deploys and the space in which the respective officers operate, one from his seat in the mall’s security dispatch centre and the other on the ground as part of her mall patrol duties. The analytic approach here is that of ethnomethodology, which prioritizes, first and foremost, the lived experiences of research subjects as against the theoretical and conceptual priorities (especially “governance,” the overwhelmingly most common focus in Canadian security studies) of the researcher. This paper offers insights into the work of security officers as well as a completely unique comparison between the viewpoints of one person who observes an unanticipated emergency via video monitor versus another who engages it firsthand, visually and corporeally. As such, it is a novel study of the role we can accord to “space” in a case study of private security in situ.