[bjterry]

It's hard to imagine a scenario where this would result in worse overall law enforcement. They are going to get 60 hours of patrol per week. Police don't really drive around upper middle class neighborhoods at all much less 35% of every hour of the week. I live in a fairly nice area in San Francisco and I go weeks without seeing a police car, and this is a denser area than Rockridge (obviously parking enforcement doesn't count, and if they do count I don't see any reason they would be displaced by security officers since they have to continue doing their jobs there no matter what the crime rate is).

It doesn't really make sense to pay for expensive personnel that are authorized to write tickets, perform searches, and use deadly force to patrol your streets when the main benefit is mostly (a) the possibility of witnessing illegal activity while it's going on, and (b) a visible presence that dissuades potential criminals from their activities. Neither of these requires nearly the level of training or expertise.

I'm not sure what the exchange rate in terms of hours is where I'd rather have the police officer patrolling rather than a security dude, but we can get a handle on the relative cost. Indeed.com says security officers in San Francisco have an average salary of $35,000, and the starting pay for police in San Francisco is $89K-$112K. If you fully burden the security officer with benefits, and fully burden the police officer with their dramatically higher level of benefits and pension, it's not difficult to imagine that the security officer is 5-6x as cost effective. So would you rather have 12 hours of police patrols or 60 hours of security officer patrols?

I suspect there is a tipping point in terms of presence past which a neighborhood gets known by thoughtful criminals as being well-patrolled, which causes a significant decrease in crimes committed there.

[allochthon]

Although it is true that you can probably wring savings out of using private security personnel over unionized police, I personally don't think the higher costs for the police are a problem -- it's hard to live on wages less than what the police in San Francisco are being paid, even in Oakland. A real problem with the legal and law enforcement systems is that they're bureaucratic and unresponsive. I do not mind more money going to them, but I also want to see them enter the Internet age and do things like answer emails.