This article will illustrate, by means of three empirical research examples conducted in South Africa, that private security operating in public spaces simultaneously retains ‘traditional’ private security mentalities of loss prevention as well as ‘traditional’ state policing mentalities of crime control and coercion. This adoption of either state or corporate mentalities and technologies is fluid, interchangeable and by no means mutually exclusive, befitting the nature of daily security activities as well as the expectations generated from policing that space. In this way, private security is evolving in its application of diverse policing mentalities in its management and interpretation of public ‘space’; in its ability to wield power both symbolically and actually and; in its tendency to adopt a variety of crime control and social ordering techniques.

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Among scholars of law and crime and practitioners of public safety, there is a pervasive view that only the public police can or should protect the public interest. Further, the prevailing perception is that the public police predominantly governs through crime-that is, acts on harms as detrimental to the public good. We argue that governing harm through crime is not always the most effective way of producing public safety and security and that the production 3 of public safety is not limited to public police forces. An approach of governing-throughharm that uses a variety of noncrime strategies and private security agents as participants in public safety is often more effective-and more legitimate-than the predominant governingthrough-crime approach. We reflect on case studies of noncrime intervention strategies from the Global South to bolster the case for decoupling the link between the public police and public goods. A new theoretical framing needs to be pursued.