PRIVATE SECTOR LIABILITY

(6hr) Continuing Training

752 & 852

Do not start this course if you need 12-hr Pre-Assignment Training.

This course is ONLY for 6-hr Continuing Training needs.

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Video Length: 9 minutes

REQUIRED: Watch entire video


COURSE RATIONALE

This course is the first in a series of future courses which intends to deal with strategies designed to avoid civil litigation in the Private Detective and Protective Agent industries.  These two disciplines make up what is called the private sector .  The private sector is vulnerable to civil litigation as these dedicated workers go about the business of preventing loss from human error, intentional criminal activity, fires, medical emergencies and natural disasters.  In addition, as these dedicated employees go about their business they have to avoid a most devastating threat in the form of legal pitfalls.  There is a need for a series of courses like this one designed to raise awareness of the presence of this threat and provide pro-active preventive actions each practitioner can take to avoid being trapped in a civil litigation that could have been avoided.

COURSE FOCUS

Because of the litigious nature of our society, this course will focus on legal consequences regarding the duty to protect, foreseeability of crime risk, negligent investigations, negligent training, negligent detention, negligent use of weapons, assault, false arrest, false imprisonment, trespass, invasion of privacy, reasonable activity, intrusive investigations, outrageous conduct, private sector authority, search and seizure, interrogation, use of force, deprivation of rights, federal law, entrapment and many other legal pitfalls that occur in the private sector.  This six hour continuing training course will be crammed full with example after example of trial court cases that support the theories and strategies being taught.

SOURCE MATERIALS

This course relies heavily on two sources.  They are:

Private Security Law, Case Studies, by David A. Maxwell, 1993, Butterworth-Heinemann, Stoneham, MA.

Private Security and the Law, by Charles Nemeth, 2005, Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, Stoneham, MA

COURSE CONTENT GOALS

The students will be exposed to the following list of topics during the above described seminars:

PRIVATE SECTOR LIABILITY
    1. Examine civil causes of actions
    2. Examine preponderance of the evidence
    3. Examine clear and convincing evidence
    4. Examine how assault gives rise to civil actions
    5. Examine how defamation gives rise to civil actions
    6. Examine how a negligent investigation gives rise to civil actions
    7. Examine how invasion of privacy gives rise to civil actions
    8. Examine how negligent detention gives rise to civil actions
    9. Examine how duty to protect gives rise to civil actions
    10. Examine how defamation gives rise to civil actions
    11. Examine how a intentional infliction of mental distress gives rise to civil actions
    12. Examine how intrusive investigations gives rise to civil actions
    13. Examine how use of force gives rise to civil actions
    14. Examine how other day-to-day performance of duties gives rise to civil actions
    15. Examine factors that bear on the foreseeability of criminality
    16. Discuss the effects of foreseeability on a case
    17. Discuss and describe strict liability torts
    18. Discuss and describe vicarious liability
    19. Discuss and describe case law
    20. Discuss and describe readings from numerous private sector case law examples
    21. Discuss and describe Civil Rights Act 42 U.S.C. Section 1983

INTRODUCTION

LETTER FROM THE TEACHER

Contract Private Detectives and Contract Security Officers, (a/k/a Contract Protective Agents in Minnesota only), while performing services for their company’s clients, can inadvertently cause unnecessary lawsuits. In most cases these lawsuits represent the reactions to required security protocols that were performed poorly or were not performed at all when they should have been performed. If the client complaint includes allegations that these security officers and private detectives failed to provide adequate safety and security for a client, these security officers and private detectives will most likely be removed from the post, but that may not fix the problem.

If an injury to a customer or patron can be traced back to a failing in the security officer’s training, of the private detective’s training and that training can be proven to be inadequate it is almost a certainty that the contract for that client will be lost. Loss of even a single client could be devastating to a small business, not to mention the loss in terms of the judgment (money) awarded the plaintiff if a lawsuit resulted from the facts in the case.

Many times a lawsuit’s pre-trial discovery proves that the employee was trained by incompetent trainers or incompetent training materials or these employees were provided only a couple of on-the- job (OTJ) training shifts with no cognitive training in a classroom. Any adequate training requires cognitive components to support the psychomotor training or OTJ training. If cognitive training is missing that could be considered inadequate training.

The only choice that security officers have who are not trained properly is to make up what they are going to do at the time of the incident. In the cases I have read in the past, what the security officer or private detective did many times was totally opposite to what they should have done caused by a lack of adequate training. That is not to say no training was provided, just that the training itself was declared very sparse and lacking proper content.

Recently in a Minnesota bar there were a few cases that relate to this point. These were both bar fight cases and in one case the bouncers did such a complete job of ejecting a trouble maker from the bar that the troublemaker was killed in the process by the bouncer. In a second case, the misbehaving patron was ejected from the bar by being secured in a headlock and pulled out of the bar by his neck. The patron wound up in the hospital. The security representative was arrested and put in jail. In a lesser case a bar fight resulted in a torn ACL ligament in the knee of the unruly patron resulting in a trip to the hospital. In another case, the failing of security resulted in a double murder in the parking lot of the bar. The unruly patron pulled a small semi-automatic handgun and shot two other patrons to death. In Minneapolis not long ago an unruly patron after being ejected by the bouncer went to his car, got his handgun, returned to the bar, and shot the bouncer to death.

Believe it or not, private detectives and protective agents are still being sent out to work with inadequate training or no training at all!! It has been my observation over the past 36 years that it is not uncommon to find a licensed security company or licensed private detective agency putting employees out to work with little or no training. The other problem no one seems to be addressing is the hiring of part time or retired police officers as trainers and contract security officers. The problem with public law enforcement personnel training private security is something called “qualified immunity” which says by law these officers and detectives cannot be sued for injuries to people if the injuries occurred during the performance of their security officer or private detective duties.

This “qualified immunity” does not exist in the private security field anywhere except in retail security. Remember that the reasonable, necessary and timely components of qualified immunity, even in retail security, comparing the two disciplines, Public Law Enforcement and Private Sector Security differ greatly. Now, if the officer or detective himself or herself falls victim to a lawsuit it might be defendable but if the trainer provided police training to private security and private detectives that could prove devastating to the contract private security or contract private detective company. Teaching private security or private detectives use of force the way police do it will someday come back to bite the company because the private sector use of force is extremely different.

Public law enforcement trained officers may not perform as well as security officers or private investigators without extensive training. Their performance needs to be directed away from public law enforcement protocols regarding actions or reactions when dealing with hostile individuals. They need to become skilled in extensive verbal de-escalation skills, calling for backup or police assistance when necessary, and never approaching a hostile environment alone.

All handcuffing should be accomplished by the two-person method for officer safety and the reality of Officer Safety First is much more of a threat in the private sector than in the public law enforcement sector. Basically this is true because most private sector practitioners are unarmed and don’t even have a chemical incapacitation device on them. Public law enforcement officers have an arsenal of weapons on them and the private sector officers have nothing but a belt holding up their pants in about 95% of the 1.8 million officers working security today.

This is especially true when comparing the “hands-on” perspective of the police officer training and the “hands-off” perspective of the private detective and private security training. The public detective who recently retired from the police force may get a little loose with using pretext calls because they have worked so well for them in the past as police officers. If so, they can become liability generators resulting in lawsuits when performed in the private sector. So, after all this bad news, be assured that these public law enforcement personnel can be turned around even after many years of public law enforcement service. On a few occasions it has been necessary for this author, in the capacity of a licensed private detective, to take on assistants who themselves were licensed private detectives and who had a history of being in public law enforcement.

In each of those cases where my assistants were retired public law enforcement officers we got along great and they quickly switched over to private security or private detectives. We call that bridging the gap that exists between the two professions. All of these close personal relationships with public law enforcers worked out perfectly. They functioned like they had not been in public law enforcement at all. In the past 36 years this author has taught thousands of students Private Security and Private Detective courses. At least 10% of these students were retired public law enforcement employees.


SOCRATIC SEMINARS FOR ON-LINE TRAINING METHODOLOGY

“The National Paideia Center, in Asheville, NC has developed extensive materials on using Socratic Seminars in classrooms. They define a Socratic Seminar as a “collaborative, intellectual dialogue facilitated with questions about a text.” Classroom discussions occur when students study the text closely, listen actively, share their ideas and questions in response to the ideas and questions of others, and search for evidence in the text to support their ideas.

A Socratic Seminar is a critical form of life-safety training for Security Officers and Private Detectives that is lost in “on-line” training because “on-line” training does not have a teacher in the classroom to facilitate discussion. Fortunately, the author of this material has invented a way to rescue the Socratic training methodology over the years in his teaching career in Graduate College courses, in Post-secondary college courses and in his continuing training Seminars in a teaching career that spans thirty one years. Thus, by a manipulation of multiple-choice question construction, the author of the course content in this course the author has customized a customized Socratic pedagogy specifically for this Seminar.

There is plenty of text material provided for the student to answer the majority of questions. However, a few questions will require looking up the answers on Google. Certainly “on-line” training is nowhere as effective as a teacher in the classroom directing a Socratic discussion. But the element of searching for the answer to the questions in the text and Google searches will help bring a portion of the training into the Socratic methodology realm.

Author Of This Course:
Charles T. Thibodeau, M.Ed., CPP, CSSM, CPO, CPOI, CFAI, CPDT, CPAT

1. Reference:  National Paideia Center, Asheville, NC 28801, (2015)  Google this for a Minnesota Paideia Center and additional information.


DISCLAIMER

The following pages of material must not be confused with an attempt of the author to hold himself out as an attorney, or a person who is a licensed attorney in any jurisdiction on the globe either domestic or foreign. This means that the author of this material is not now and never has been licensed to practice law. No one in the administration of this company, Charles T. Thibodeau and Associates, has ever been licensed to practice law. The author is holding himself out as a very successful Expert Witness in court trials both as a plaintiff’s expert and a defendant’s expert. He began his Expert Witness career in 1991. He is currently performing in that field of Expert Witness.

At this time we are writing in March 2017. The author has been an expert witness in both Criminal Court and Civil Court as well as both State Court and Federal Court for a total of 26 years. This author intends to continue working as an Expert Witness in cases where the subject matter of a lawsuit meets his Expert level of knowledge in any particular subject relating to the Private Security and the Private Detective professions. To obtain a Curriculum Vitae of this author’s background. Please send an email request and snail-mail a check for $3.00 for postage and copy costs and the author will send you his 18 page Curriculum Vitae.

There are 4 Lessons in this Course.
You must Pass the Quiz in each Lesson before you are able to move onto the next Lesson.

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Do not click on the Lesson links below, unless you have already Started the Course, and need to continue.

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Lessons

Lesson 2 NEGLIGENCE/INTENTIONAL TORT (PSL 6hr)

Length: 90 minutes

Length: 37 minutes REQUIRED: Watch entire video DEFINITIONS: A. Tort Law is defined as: A Tort is a civil wrong arising from an act or failure to act, independently of any implied or expressed contract, against another’s person, property, or reputation, for which the injured party is entitled to seek compensation. It is a civil […]

Lesson 3 ADDITIONAL LIABILITY CONCERN (PSL 6hr)

Length: 90 minutes

TOTALITY OF CIRCUMSTANCES The totality of circumstances is what every lawsuit should be judged by. It is said that after everything has been closely examined, the totality of circumstances will determine the outcome. That means that if a person who depicts herself or himself as a victim of some vicious attack, before we can take […]

Lesson 4 ETHICS and PROFESSIONAL CONDUCT (PSL 6hr)

Length: 90 minutes

Length: 29 minutes REQUIRED: Watch entire video ETHICS IS OF PRIMARY CONCERN Definitions: 1. Ethics is defined as:  “Doing what is right when no one is watching”.2. Integrity is defined as:  “Behavior that follows a code of values or principles.”3. Morals is defined as:  “The principle of right behavior, conforming to a standard of right behavior, knowing right […]