I voiced my concerns to John DeCarlo, an associate professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, to assess how reasonable they were. DeCarlo, who was a police officer for 34 years before joining John Jay’s faculty, said some things that validated my worries and others that undercut them. “If I were a company, and I was funding a police department, I would ultimately want things to go the way I wanted them to go,” he reasons. “I don’t see that there’s accountability to the public built into private companies…We don’t even know what their political agenda is.” In short, it’s important to make sure they won’t be beholden to whoever’s furnishing them with money. That said, DeCarlo pointed out that the practice, which the Journal called “unusual,” isn’t all that foreign. Police officers are frequently hired by nongovernmental organizations like water companies and shopping malls, yet they’re granted many of the same powers as when they're working for municipal departments.

Though the practice is already common, it will become even more so in the future. “With municipal pensions being the issue that they are, and governmental funding and taxes going the way they are, we are going to see a trend in the United States toward more privatization in policing than less,” he says.

Understanding the trend of oncoming privatization requires understanding the origins of policing. The word “sheriff,” DeCarlo told me, dates back to the Middle Ages, when wealthy landowners hired groups of men to keep the peace in their villages, then known as shires. These bands reported to a reeve, or leader, known as the “shire reeve”—two words that over time fused into “sheriff.” From then until the late 1800s, policing remained a private undertaking. It was only after London established the first metropolitan police department in 1863 that the idea of a public police force caught on in the United States. “The roots of policing are really private,” DeCarlo says.

In the past 150 years or so, policing has mostly been (and has been mostly perceived as) a public endeavor—but that’s been changing. DeCarlo points to a number of ways in which the private sphere has bled into public policing. The doormen and security guards employed by private security companies (who can, for the record, carry guns), for example, talk on police radios with municipal policemen. Also, the rise of what DeCarlo calls “mass private spaces”—think malls—has led the owners of said spaces to employ private forces to patrol them, since public police departments don’t. DeCarlo has also observed that the dispatch centers routing 911 calls are run more and more often by private companies.

But the most lucrative privatized policing jobs are also the ones that are the most ingrained in the municipal police system. They’re what DeCarlo calls “private duty jobs.” These jobs, which are often arranged through police departments, send officers in municipal uniforms to work for private contractors, like when a cop stands over an uncovered manhole as workers descend, or when a cop stands guard at a movie theater. These jobs can pay as much as $50 an hour, which means that the average entry-level cop—who, DeCarlo estimates, might make a little more than $40,000 a year—can almost double his or her income by regularly working private duty jobs. “When I was chief of police, I was maybe the lowest-paid guy in the department,” DeCarlo says, “because all the other officers, the rank and file officers, were taking…private duty jobs.”