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Eric Rodriguez works in a white-collar office building in Manhattan, but on the day we met he was dressed for battle in Da Nang. He wore a sweat-wicking gunmetal-gray shirt, black combat boots, and brown cargo pants. Knives peeked out from two pants pockets, and a Leatherman sat on his belt next to a small, swinging bottle of hand sanitizer. There was also a first aid kit strapped to his leg under his pants, or so he said. Rodriguez was prepared for bad things and convinced the worst was soon to come. “I have two to three flashlights on me at any one time,” he said. “And I take about forty vitamins a day.”

I met Rodriguez on a rain-drenched morning last fall. It was my first day at Allied Universal Academy, a security-guard training center, and Rodriguez—a tall, broad-shouldered bald man with nearly forty years of guarding under his tactical belt—was my instructor. He worked for my prospective employer, Allied Universal, the largest security firm in the world.

When I and more than two dozen other bleary-eyed students first entered his classroom, Rodriguez was standing alert at a lectern adorned with a sign that read: stand back! don’t approach desk! Behind the desk in question—which, for the record, I never approached—stood a miniature American flag and on top of it was a leather binder affixed with a POW/MIA sticker.

Early in his introductory remarks, Rodriguez told us about his six years serving in the U.S. Army. While he never saw conflict, Rodriguez still appeared to view himself as a fighter. His Facebook profile picture, he told us, depicted a Revolutionary War soldier running into battle, and his email signature included quotes on patriotism and courage by Mark Twain and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, respectively.

As a reporter who mostly covers the military and veterans, I saw in Rodriguez a paranoid intensity that felt both familiar and totally foreign, something akin to anticipatory PTSD. With his decades as a watchman, Rodriguez seemed to be racked by an ever-present fear of chaos—and he was a believer in a guard’s purportedly vital but nebulously defined role in dealing with it.

During our three-day licensing course, Rodriguez clicked through a curriculum of state-approved PowerPoint slides. Most focused on a security guard’s basic, boring duties, but a few ventured into the more ominous predicaments one might encounter on the job. Rodriguez breezed through the day-to-day material covering when to use a fire extinguisher and how to fill out a logbook, but lingered on the slides about dirty bombs, mass shootings, and terrorist attacks. From there, he often spiraled into conspiratorial warnings about society’s coming crack-up. “If you’re not ahead of the game,” he said, “you’ll be destroyed.”

I could never quite tell if Rodriguez believed security guards would really help to prevent this Armageddon. He exalted the guard’s duties and just as readily diminished them, toggling back and forth between chest-puffing, law-and-order monologues about the industry’s vital importance and transparent admissions of his own flaws and fears. He went off script to show us how to take down an attacker. Then he identified himself as “vice president of the American Cowardly Association” and advised us to, in all serious emergencies, run.

As a self-professed sheep in wolf’s clothing, Rodriguez was the perfect avatar for an industry built on providing a sense of security and not much more. The security guard is embodied proof of the power of optics: someone who looks vaguely like a cop, stands vaguely like a cop, has a badge that shines vaguely like a cop’s, and can wield power like a cop. This is especially true if they’re armed like a cop, as these days more and more of them are.

Some of my fellow guards in training seemed to like the feeling of wearing a uniform. They included an Army veteran, a TSA officer, and a T.J. Maxx loss-prevention specialist. Others weren’t especially passionate about flexing authority or saving lives. The most common questions concerned pay and vacation policies.

Near the end of the course, Rodriguez said that our motivations for the job didn’t matter. When chaos strikes, he explained, a guard is front and center—a prime target, a presumed protector, or both. “Most people, they have no clue, they don’t understand what you do,” he said. “They like to belittle you, they like to besmirch you, they like to talk bad about you. But when something goes wrong, they are going to come to you. I promise you.” I shifted nervously in my chair. This seemed like one hell of a mission for someone earning just above minimum wage.

For millennia, the figure of the guard has inspired as much derision as demand. An early antecedent to the modern security guard can be found in ancient Egypt. Nobles employed “doorkeepers” to protect palaces and tombs. The performance of such duties was accorded a measure of reverence even as guards were often cast as apathetic or incompetent. Some hieroglyphs depict doorkeepers as those “who ward off all evil ones”; others show them as sleepy, drunk, or blind.

Many still believe in this image of guards as feckless agents in spaces not in need of protecting. And yet, in a moment of peculiarly American volatility, certain places that guards patrol—like schools, bars, grocery stores, and retail outlets—are increasingly prone to seeing outbursts of violence. These trends might justify a guard’s usefulness if not for the fact that most guards lack the training or legal authority to do much of anything.

Despite this ineffectiveness, private security is a rapidly growing industry. As I finished my own instruction and prepared to start my job, these strange and contradictory dynamics gnawed at me. Why, I wondered, had we amassed this army of paper tigers?

It may be that even an illegitimate force is capable of countering irrational fears. For a decade, researchers at Chapman University have conducted annual surveys tracing the growing prevalence of anxiety in America. Their data suggests a cascading effect in which tangible concerns, such as those about polluted drinking water or government corruption, prime the mind for more remote ones about, say, illegal immigration or large volcanic eruptions. And Americans’ fear of crime is particularly disconnected from reality. Gallup’s most recent annual crime survey found that 40 percent of Americans are afraid to walk alone at night near their homes, the figure marking a thirty-year high that runs counter to plunging violent-crime rates. Edward Day, a professor of sociology at Chapman and one of the survey’s principal investigators, told me that these misplaced fears are fueled by politics and the mass media, but also by the expanded presence of cops and security guards, who evoke both an aura of protection and a specter of forces to be protected from. By this logic, guards justify their existence by their mere presence, and this can in turn suggest the need for still more of them. This self-reinforcing cycle has led to explosive growth for firms like Allied, which by some measures is now North America’s third-largest private employer, behind only Walmart and Amazon, and the seventh largest in the world.

The architect of Allied Universal’s recent success is Steve Jones, its CEO, a beefy former college football player whose self-help book’s title, No Off Season: The Constant Pursuit of More, just about says it all. Jones lacks the cloak-and-dagger aspect of his most successful forebear, Allan Pinkerton, whose namesake agency once commanded a force of private detectives larger than the U.S. Army. But Jones has arguably perfected and expanded on Pinkerton’s model, building a private global force that is now nearly twice as large as the Army, at approximately eight hundred thousand people strong.

Allied is chiefly focused on addressing the fears of corporations, not everyday people. Jones holds contracts with virtually every company listed on the New York Stock Exchange and more than four hundred of the Fortune 500. Corporate security work has long elevated routine business worries—like shoplifting, loitering, and homelessness—into urgent criminal problems. A recent report commissioned by Allied identified the greatest security threat as the growing incidence of theft before citing newer concerns, such as “social unrest [and] climate change,” as well as “hackers, protestors, [and] spies.” Pinkerton famously claimed that his firm foiled an 1861 assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln. Last year, Jones boasted that his guards had “extinguished fires, foiled human trafficking, prevented suicides, and removed firearms from public spaces.”

Since September 11, an increasing proportion of guards are armed. They serve not only corporate clients but private individuals and even local governments. Time magazine recently profiled the head of a Philadelphia agency, Andre Boyer, who said that he had been hired by a father to accompany his two kids to the movies armed with a shotgun. The magazine reported on a similar situation at nearby Temple University, where the mother of a student hired a private-security company to patrol the area near her son’s off-campus apartment after a local shooting. The initiative was eventually adopted by a larger group of parents who reportedly paid around one thousand dollars a week to maintain the extra coverage.

Conventional wisdom holds that the security industry booms when police departments bust. But reductions to American law-enforcement agencies have been generally minor. Although the New York City Police Department, for instance, saw a dip in staffing levels during the pandemic, the agency has since hired thousands of new officers, and the ranks of law enforcement across the country increased last year for the first time since 2020.

Yet while guards lack the training and public oversight of cops, they are increasingly coming to resemble them. A few years ago, the industry went so far as to co-opt the “thin blue line” of the police, choosing the color purple to represent security guards. The “thin purple line” has unofficially upgraded the guard to the echelon of first responder. This despite the fact that guarding, even with its intense and isolated pockets of danger, is a job that’s about as dangerous as that of an elementary school teacher. Not that this has stopped some guards from seeing enemies everywhere. “They’re terrifying people,” Rodriguez said of this emergent ilk. “And some of them are violent.”

It has been estimated that, over the past decade, hundreds of security guards have been arrested for manslaughter or murder. In 2019, California saw two incidents in which Allied-employed guards allegedly knelt on the necks of restrained citizens and killed them. The year before, Allied-employed guards harassed and threatened to fight an unarmed black man at Denver’s Union Station. One guard then led the man into a station bathroom, where he was beaten unconscious and suffered permanent brain damage. Last May, the San Francisco district attorney’s office declined to file charges against an Allied-employed guard who shot and killed an unarmed black man suspected of shoplifting from a Walgreens. In an earnings call just months prior, the drugstore chain’s chief financial officer had signaled a pivot away from private security, admitting that it had been “largely ineffective.” Robert McCrie, a longtime professor of security management at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told me that, while it seems intuitively true that it serves a purpose, the industry has never empirically proved that it has reduced crime: “In my fifty-four years studying the industry, I have failed to see the presence of a scientifically structured research project that identified the value of security in fighting crime.”

In our class, Rodriguez made clear that, despite some lawsuits and localized activism, the company remains highly profitable. “I have a company credit card—me, a nobody,” he told us, adding that Allied had recently bought pizza and doughnuts for its staff. When a classmate then asked if we would be given any free food as part of our three-day unpaid training, Rodriguez shook his head. “No,” he said. “They don’t give it to you.”

Allied’s business model relies on keeping labor costs low and deploying warm bodies as quickly as possible. In service of this mission, Rodriguez whizzed through our training materials before providing us with the answers to our certification exams before we took them. He recommended we take his de-escalation course but said it wasn’t required. He then immediately cast doubt on the course’s efficacy with an anecdote about a guard upstate who, shortly after completing the class, grabbed an intruder and threw him onto the street, at which point he was hit by a speeding vehicle. “We are being sued right now for that man throwing that man out the door,” he explained matter-of-factly. “That’s a payoff—we had to pay them off. Just give them oodles of money to make it go away.”

Immediately after our tests (we passed), Rodriguez handed us off to an Allied supervisor in a room across the hall. She ran us through a truncated employee onboarding process, which skipped over sexual-harassment training. Then we self-administered mouth-swab drug tests. The guy next to me didn’t look like much of a meth head, but he came up positive for crank. The supervisor brushed it aside. This kind of laissez-faire attitude surfaced in Time’s report when a guard trainer recalled flagging a candidate at another company who appeared to be suffering from severe mental-health issues. “I said I wasn’t going to be able to qualify this guy,” he said, “but they just shrugged.”

Once I came up clean, I was fingerprinted for a background check and measured for a scratchy black suit to wear while on duty. Then I was summoned to a back room overflowing with black vests, sweaters, and jackets stamped with the word security. There, a tired-looking man at a computer took my picture for an ID badge. He asked for my height, weight, and eye color, clacking out the first two categories correctly before entering my eye color as brlue and clicking Print. My security-guard license from New York State was still pending, but I was temporarily cleared to work. I looked the part and had a vague notion of what to do. It was time to protect the Big Apple and defend the thin purple line.^*

New York City and its environs host the highest concentration of security guards in America. There are an estimated 131,760 of us—more than three times the number of NYPD officers. This largely inconspicuous force is stationed in some of the city’s most rarefied spaces and some of its most ordinary ones, from luxury high-rises and world-class art museums to homeless shelters, ATM vestibules, and subway stations. I was sent to the headquarters of the Bank of New York Mellon, an investment bank founded 240 years ago by Alexander Hamilton that today sits in the shadow of One World Trade Center. BNY’s glassy twenty-three-floor tower suffered moderate damage on September 11, and surveillance and security are of paramount importance here, in this neighborhood that can never forget. On my walks to work, I spotted bollards, cameras, checkpoints, and security agents of public and private provenance. HQ itself is protected by cops, cameras, and a bomb-sniffing dog, but security guards provide the building’s protective core, keeping watch 24/7/365. For about six months, I served as a minor cog in this well-oiled operation, working two days a week from three o’clock to eleven at night.

Here I quickly discovered that a guard’s appearance is of utmost importance. Before I began my first shift, a supervisor gave me a close visual assessment. He found my suit appropriately fitted, but dinged me for wearing white socks instead of the requisite black. He then yanked on my black tie and flashed a look of disappointment. “It’s real,” he exclaimed, before tugging on his own tie by way of contrast. His was a clip-on. He went on to explain that, should he ever be attacked, his tie would pose no threat to him. Mine, on the other hand, could be weaponized into a silk noose. There weren’t any spare clip-ons around, but he deemed the tie threat negligible that day, so off I went into the maelstrom.

The job is notoriously low-paying and physically taxing, contributing to an annual industry turnover rate that has been estimated to be as high as 600 percent. When my immediate supervisor whisked me around the bank as part of my on-site training, she lamented the significant time and energy she’d invested in guards who quit after only a few weeks. She seemed convinced that I would be no different, and tailored her training accordingly. “Ask questions,” she said half-heartedly, “or you can just be quiet.”

I spent the early hours of most shifts stationed in the building’s airy atrium, which boasts a resplendent two-story wall of plant life. It was a space built to be seen. In exchange for special permits allowing the building to rise higher than regulations allow, its owner promised the city that it would designate its atrium a so-called privately owned public space, or POPS. Around 2001, the building quietly reneged on this agreement. In 2016, officials from the comptroller’s office showed up as part of a sweeping audit of the POPS program. Guards denied them entrance and stopped them from taking pictures. The comptroller’s subsequent report ruled that the building was out of compliance, and the lobby was briefly and begrudgingly made accessible to the public. But in 2021, the city accepted a proposal from BNY to remove the “public lobby” label from its floor plans; in return, the bank agreed to improve the publicly accessible space outside the building.

On a typical day, I was tasked with checking staff badges near the atrium’s main set of revolving doors. It was a mundane but highly visible post, and management frequently gave me feedback. They told me to smile, to stand straight, to uncross my arms, to take my hands out of my pockets, and to say “good evening” more often. I felt objectified by the bank, like I was its human scarecrow, but my co-workers were, overall, supportive and professional. They found dignity in their work, and I wanted to do right by them.

Early in each shift, I checked badges with care. But as the hours wore on, I often found myself hypnotized by the steady rhythm of the revolving doors. Inattention was generally acceptable so long as it was concealed, an approach that one manager inelegantly summed up to me as “look aware, not be aware.” My supervisor coached me on her more meditative mindset, which she compared to that of a pitcher in baseball. “He’s watching like a hawk, but he’s also zoned out in his own game,” she said. I usually worked alongside a retired cop in his mid-seventies whom I’ll call Carlos. He had a hint of a white mustache and an impressive stamina that belied his age. When we first met, Carlos offered me a sobering piece of advice: “The most important thing to know about security is that you’re a target, but you have no weapon,” he said. Then he showed me how to use the X-ray machine. Once Carlos had walked me through how to spot a gun and a bomb, I asked him about the protocol should I ever actually see one. He told me to call my supervisor, which felt like an inadequate and improbable reaction to what would qualify as an active terror situation.

Once the bank’s staff had cleared out, around nine o’clock, I was sent to the building’s top floor and told to patrol my way down to the lobby. For hours, I walked the floors, surveying a sea of empty cubicles while dozens of muted monitors played Shark Tank and CNBC programming. It was a lot of walking. On my first shift, my brand-new pair of Doc Martens cut painfully into my feet. After I’d patrolled about ten floors, my left heel started to bleed. For shift number two, I borrowed my roommate’s comfier shoes, but the patrols still took a toll on my back. Co-workers had warned me that cameras were always watching, so when I needed to rest and stretch, I ducked behind a filing cabinet and lay down like a snow angel.

On some nights I was sent outside to patrol. Beforehand, a manager would equip me with a digital camera and tell me to snap pictures of anything that looked suspicious. The scenes captured on previous shifts greatly stretched the definition. Among the objects that had raised red flags were an abandoned wheelchair, a fist-size graffiti tag, and a stray couch pillow. Not once did my vigilance, indoors or out, identify anything that came close to a security threat. Still, it seemed that my duties, endlessly executed by an ever-rotating cast of black-suited, clip-on-tied employees, served as an effective form of deterrence.

The mood changed on November 17, when the building became a symbol of Israel’s excessive response to October 7. That morning, dozens of people gathered in front of the BNY building to protest the bank’s significant holdings in Elbit Systems, an Israeli defense firm accused of producing drones and ammunition used in the country’s siege of Gaza. The protest was righteous but tame. That didn’t stop a phalanx of NYPD officers from arresting twenty peaceful protesters and dragging them away.

I was trained to view these outsiders as my enemies, and some longtime guards at the bank did see them this way. Others wondered why such a clearly powerful and impervious institution seemed so afraid of the First Amendment. Perhaps the bank was aware of just how much could be discovered through a little scrutiny. While I never uncovered evidence of criminal wrongdoing out on the street, I found that plenty had occurred inside the building. Over the past three decades, the bank now known as BNY Mellon has accrued a long rap sheet of financial crimes, including bribery, foreign exchange fraud, and pension plundering. Just prior to the 2007 merger between the Bank of New York and Mellon Financial, the former paid $38 million in penalties after federal investigators found that it had helped move $7 billion in illicit funds. According to the 2020 disclosures in the FinCEN Files, one of the shadowy figures it worked with was Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch accused of, among other things, ordering the murder of an American banking executive. This information presented a more unsettling theory about my employment. Perhaps I hadn’t been hired to protect BNY from criminal elements, but was instead brought on to help shield a villainous enterprise from outside examination.

Things weren’t always this way. Back in the Fear City era of the Seventies, buildings were largely unencumbered by guards and turnstiles. As a result, Gustave Lipman, the former COO of Guardsmark, told me that crime would often “seep into the office building.” News reports from the time described intruders prowling from high-rise to high-rise. “People would go into the bathroom and, you know, hit somebody over the head and steal their wallet, and then go to the next floor,” Lipman recalled.

The NYPD had by then lost approximately 15 percent of its officers to budget cuts. This led business and civic groups to bankroll private-security forces to fill the gaps. It was the Association for a Better New York, not the city government, that funded the installation of New York’s first public surveillance cameras, in Times Square. The association, which today counts BNY as a member, also deployed more than three hundred guards across Midtown as part of Operation Interlock, whose name nodded to the group’s cozy relationship with the cops. Guards could communicate via radio network with the NYPD.

Many were still more familiar with the criminal code. In 1980, New York State found that there were twenty thousand guards with criminal records. Three years later, a damning report from the state’s investigation commission revealed flagrant lawbreaking within the industry. The report found that some security firms were leveraging their expedited access to gun permits to make lucrative money on the side as black-market arms dealers. One New York City firm called Systems VII was exposed as nothing more than a gun front. It sold permits for as much as two thousand dollars a pop to numerous city residents, including a model, a chauffeur, a commodities broker, and Rusty Staub, a slugger for the Mets who was ultimately hauled before the state commission to testify to his involvement.

There was also 1900 Special Services, which smoothed its own path to illicit gun permits by bribing an NYPD employee with cash and a color TV. Hoping to demonstrate the need for its business, the company also burglarized its own clients. Before long, the company’s headquarters was in large part outfitted with goods stolen from clients, including glassware, batteries, light bulbs, and plumbing supplies. One score involved stealing, per the testimony of a former employee, as much as three quarters of a million dollars’ worth of prescription drugs from a warehouse it guarded. But the company orchestrated its most daring stunt on May 20, 1980, when some of its workers zoomed down a Brooklyn highway in pursuit of a fuel tanker owned by a client, Sunmark Corporation. Once they pulled alongside the truck, the guards shot and struck its frame, forced it off the road, and hijacked it. The state’s 1983 report determined that, had the bullets struck the tanker itself, the entire thing would have exploded. It concluded with an urgent call for regulation: “The answer to the question, ‘Who is to guard the guards themselves?’ cannot be permitted to remain, as it is currently, ’No one.’ ” (An oversight agency did exist at the time, but it employed just fifty-two investigators, who were tasked with overseeing not only guards but also private investigators, real estate brokers, hairdressers, and cosmetologists.)

Lipman was the rare proponent of regulation. He pointed to Guardsmark’s self-imposed checks and balances as a model for what good guarding could be. The company rigorously vetted applicants during the hiring process, and tailored its training to specific assignments, such as those in places like chemical facilities, water treatment plants, and banks. Company rules were upheld through a rigid enforcement structure modeled on the FBI’s Inspection Division and carried out mostly by former G-men, instilling what Lipman described as a “fear of God” among everyone on payroll.

In 1992, Guardsmark teamed up with then-senator Al Gore to propose legislation instating tougher standards for guards under federal contract. The bill languished in Congress. A year later, New York governor Mario Cuomo signed into law the Security Guard Act, which aimed to clean up the state’s unruly industry. McCrie, the John Jay professor, helped draft the bill. He fought for a forty-hour training requirement and federal background checks. New York ultimately adopted them, but required prospective guards to undergo only eight hours of training, plus sixteen hours of on-the-job instruction and an annual eight-hour refresher course. While McCrie is grateful that New York created a regulatory framework, he described the state’s standards as “pitifully low” when compared with those of California and most European countries. Spain, for example, mandates at least 180 training hours for new recruits, and 20 hours each year thereafter.

New York’s weak regulations have been further diluted by poor oversight. This led to the rise of diploma mills that sell guard certificates to people uninterested in or unable to dedicate a day or more of uncompensated time to training. In 2016, a security guard named Luis Baez told City Limits that he earned his eight-hour certificate in thirty minutes. “They give you a bullshit test, and they give you the answers,” he explained. “You fill in the bubbles, and that’s sent to the state.”

Rodriguez did the same thing before our test, though he kept us in his classroom for the requisite number of hours. Over this period, he sailed through important sections and went off script for hours on end. At one point, he advised us to study FEMA’s flood maps and buy cheap transistor radios. He also exclaimed that the news, from MSNBC to Fox, is “telling you lies couched in lies.” He included interesting claims about the origins of COVID-19, which Rodriguez said was unleashed by Bill Gates to “cull the herd.” Later, he touted the benefits of hydroxychloroquine. “I’m not a science denier,” he explained. “I’m just a science-fact person.” When we arrived at the course’s counterterrorism section, Rodriguez recounted his own stresses working as a guard on September 11. Then he suggested that the whole thing had been an inside job.

In the decades before 9/11, airport security was the exclusive domain of private firms. For years, Guardsmark held many of these contracts. The company helped spearhead the use of magnetometers and developed security protocols in response to the 1970 hijacking of five planes by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Lipman said his company left the airline sector in 1988, feeling that airlines were increasingly opting for cheap contracts over high standards. In swooped Frank Argenbright, who had started the firm bearing his name as a small polygraph-test outfit in 1979. By 2001, Argenbright Security was among the winners of the airline industry’s race to the bottom, reportedly controlling nearly 40 percent of all airport checkpoints in America.

On the morning of September 11, it was Argenbright Security that allowed nine hijackers, some armed with box cutters, to pass through checkpoints at Dulles and Newark Airports. Surveillance footage from Dulles shows that, after some of the men triggered metal detectors, guards wanded them in ways that were, according to an expert consulted by the 9/11 Commission, “marginal at best.” A couple of hours later, American Airlines Flight 77, from Dulles, hit the Pentagon. United Airlines Flight 93, from Newark, crashed in a Pennsylvania field following intervention by ordinary passengers. Additional lapses by guards in Boston allowed ten more men to board and hijack the two planes that hit the World Trade Center. Some of the first responders in New York were also in the security industry, including Rick Rescorla, a British expat and U.S. Army veteran who was responsible for the safety of over 2,500 Morgan Stanley employees in the South Tower. Rescorla helped save the lives of all but six of them by activating the evacuation plan he developed in the wake of the 1993 bombing. Survivors recalled Rescorla punctuating his shouts of Get the hell out! with Cornish folk songs. He was one of at least 279 security officers who died that day.

In 2019, President Trump presented Rescorla with a posthumous Presidential Citizens Medal. During the ceremony, Trump called him a “great gentleman” before expressing unconcealed jealousy over his abundance of public tributes, including from the English, who named a passenger train in Rescorla’s honor. Nonetheless, Trump was all too happy to accept a scale-model replica of the train on Rescorla’s behalf, and to pin blame for 9/11 on his political enemies. His friends, Frank Argenbright among them, he has gladly exonerated of any wrongdoing.

Argenbright and Trump first connected in 1986, after Trump learned of a fundraising campaign Argenbright was promoting to save a Georgia widow’s farm facing foreclosure. Trump interceded to prevent the auction of the property and alongside Argenbright helped fundraise on behalf of the late farmer’s wife. Once the goal was met, he threw a party in the Trump Tower atrium, where they ceremonially burned the paid-off mortgage. Trump later hired the Argenbright group to manage some of his residential properties on the Hudson River. Perhaps he was enticed by the company’s reputation for keeping costs low, no matter what.

In the wake of 9/11, journalists and the government scrutinized Argenbright’s cut-rate security practices, exposing a series of legal and labor violations. Hundreds of Argenbright’s workers in Philadelphia, for instance, were found to have been shown a forty-five-minute training video in lieu of the required forty-hour course. The company had failed to conduct background checks for more than 1,300 employees. Most earned little more than minimum wage and received no health benefits or sick days. Many were illegally threatened after they went on strike in protest of low pay. A former Argenbright manager on the Trump account told me that Argenbright was losing money on the contract. (A calculated loss, perhaps, because of how good the name Trump looked on the clientele list they’d flaunt to reel in potential clients.) This led to especially grueling labor conditions that caused some guards to quit altogether. “Those who were reliable we abused terribly,” the former manager recalled. “We drove them into the ground.”

But rather than increase the quality of guarding, companies in New York simply hired a greater quantity of guards, as though a qualitative problem were a quantitative one. In the wake of the attacks, the ranks of licensed guards again swelled, while the MTA—via its If You See Something, Say Something campaign—deputized each and every citizen to act as an unofficial scout in the mission to maintain order. Many municipal employees across agencies were armed and put on watch. One newly armed worker was Thomas Duffy, a bridge and tunnel officer at the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. “It was a crazy knee-jerk reaction with basically no training,” he told me. Duffy’s experience on the Verrazzano was a cartoonish smoke-and-mirrors affair perfectly distilled by one occasion in which a police car was stationed on the bridge manned, in its driver’s seat, by a mop wearing a hat.

One of Duffy’s post-9/11 assignments was stopping and searching trucks on the bridge.

“What are we looking for?” he recalled asking one of his supervisors.

“I don’t know, Duff,” the lieutenant responded. “But if the box says acme, I’m running.”

A few months later, when Duffy was posted in a security booth at one of the bridge’s anchorages, the hammer of his .38 revolver caught the back of his chair and the gun shot him in the foot. Shortly after, bridge employees began receiving comprehensive firearms training.

Yet the city’s post-9/11 security frenzy included no real boost in oversight, training, or pay. As a result, New York’s public advocate concluded in a 2005 report that guards remained “ill-prepared to protect [the] public.” The report laid much of the blame on the industry’s persistent failure to pay guards at levels that reflected the importance of their duties. One guard summed up this imbalance succinctly: “I’m not dying for $9.80.”

Today, average annual wages nationwide remain low, at around $40,000, even as some guards are stationed in hot spots, leading to a slight but steady increase in physical threats, injuries, and deaths across the profession. In 2022, after Aaron Salter Jr., an Allied guard, was killed during a racially motivated mass shooting at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York, other Allied guards with posts at the chain claimed that the company had refused their requests for safety improvements, including the issuance of bulletproof vests. “My name ain’t Clark Kent,” one of them vented to a local news station.

Meanwhile, labor organizing among security guards had long been hobbled by an obscure provision of the National Labor Relations Act that allowed companies to refuse recognition of bargaining units composed of both guard and non-guard employees. This precedent was overturned in 2016 by the National Labor Relations Board, but the change is vulnerable to reversal and reinterpretation amid the board’s always-churning membership. My co-workers and I had union representation, but the work remains complicated by industry conditions, including high employee turnover and the power of corporate clients, which can drop a firm if they deem the labor costs too high. One co-worker grumbled that the bank’s cleaners had a far better contract than the guards. “They get the stretch limousine of benefits,” he said. “We get the Mazda 3.”

Over the past decade the industry’s unionization rate has hovered around 13 percent, and a few state and local governments have imposed tougher training and oversight measures. California now mandates use-of-force training for all guards and requires them to report any discharge of a firearm. A spokesperson for New York State acknowledged that it suspended just three guards last year, and audited only 87 of the 3,855 licensed security-guard employers in operation.

As oversight flags, the industry has consolidated into a few powerful firms, chief among them Allied, which is secretive and privately held. The company was in the process of securing its primacy in 2015, when Universal Services of America acquired Guardsmark, whose internal compliance standards, such as unannounced site audits, had been maintained because the company had resisted pressure to grow expediently. Little more than a year later, Universal merged with AlliedBarton Security Services, officially becoming the largest security firm on the continent.

Lipman doesn’t know if Guardsmark’s strict oversight structures were kept in place after the acquisition. The only form of compliance I encountered on the job appeared in the form of a slick, silver-haired Allied executive with a vaguely Eastern European accent who reeked of cologne. During my time guarding the BNY headquarters, the man showed up twice, asked my name, and took my picture, assessing my appearance to make sure I looked the part. Then he left.

In 2021, Allied acquired another company, SecurAmerica, which was founded in 2005 by Frank Argenbright. “I have personally known Frank for over twenty years,” Steve Jones said in a statement announcing the news, adding that SecurAmerica’s “people and culture will fit perfectly into Allied Universal and our long-term organizational plans.” These plans included locking down airline-security work in countries where it remains out of government hands. Allied boasts contracts with nearly ninety airlines in more than one hundred fifty airports around the world. In February, three dozen Allied employees at the Victoria International Airport, in British Columbia, were fired after a probe by the Canadian government concluded that they “did not fulfil their core responsibility to protect the travelling public.”

During one of my last shifts, on a cold night in January, a co-worker on break spotted a small throng of pro-Palestine protesters gathered near the Oculus. He alerted our supervisor, who then ordered a couple of other guards and me to erect crowd-control gates outside the main entrance. None of the protesters ever showed up. Around this time, management added a new face to our big black binder of people whom we were instructed to never admit. He was a recently fired bank employee who’d been escorted off the premises. All I was told was that he was “aligned” with the protesters.

The bank soon began operating on code red, creating new security posts and further padding Steve Jones’s pockets. Some guards were working seven-day weeks, clear-eyed about the fact that the only real way to live in New York on seventeen dollars an hour is to rack up overtime. One guard compared the experience of a double shift to a triple shot of bourbon. When I asked another co-worker how it felt to work eighty-hour weeks, she popped her eyes wide and shivered like an eel.

If a major goal of these added shifts—and guarding in general—was to fight the war against fear, it didn’t feel like we were winning. But how could we? We were not guardians against fear but expressions of it, human markers placed in uneasy environments, providing permission for society to ignore the underlying issues that make them that way. Sustained exposure to these environments can be psychically damaging. Carlos had been steeped in this world for decades, and he frequently fulminated about what he saw as the city’s myriad threats, like safe injection sites, immigrants, and Antifa. He saw the subway as a cesspool of promiscuous women, deranged beggars, and violent criminals. Despite his meager pay, he told me he had sworn off public transit entirely, shelling out for a car service that ferried him to and from work.

I initially took Carlos for a somewhat hateful man, but really he was just another casualty of the fear economy. While Carlos frequently resorted to NYPD muscle memory, his natural state was warm and welcoming. He often whistled Spanish love songs when he operated the X-ray machine. When bank employees shuffled out at the end of the day, he patted their backs, squeezed their shoulders, and asked about their families. When Carlos missed work, everybody asked about him. His most common farewell was the guard’s clarion call—“Stay safe!”—concisely encapsulating the industry’s passive ethos. Coming out of Carlos’s mouth, the phrase telegraphed real worry about the streets and real concern for those who walked them, but it was ultimately nothing more than a flimsy wish. I’m sure Carlos genuinely wants these people to be protected, but that simply isn’t his job.