Last month, 22-year-old Ameer Ali was walking toward a Sephora beauty supply store on the ground floor of the Embarcadero Center when a stranger stopped him.
The gray-haired man, wearing just street clothes and sunglasses, claimed he was a security guard.
“You’re gonna steal. Come on,” he says in a now-viral video of the March 15 encounter, filmed by Ali’s co-worker Nicholas Kincaid.
In the video, you can hear Ali grow upset and incredulous. How could he possibly assume they were thieves?
“I’ve been around for a long time,” the guard retorts.
Then, when asked to show proof that he was an Embarcadero Center security guard, the man flashed a handgun on his hip and showed off a badge as an inspector for the San Francisco District Attorney’s office, Ali told ABC7.
As it turned out, the security guard — identified as 77-year-old Mike Koppel by ABC7 — hadn’t worked for the DA’s office since 2007. Koppel’s no longer at the Embarcadero Center, either: Property owner Boston Properties Inc. (BXP) said in a statement to Gazetteer SF that he has been removed from the site pending an investigation from the “third-party security partner,” which it declined to name. BXP also declined to answer questions about its security hiring practices and the number of guards on its four major properties in the city, including Salesforce Tower.
In so many ways, the incident illustrates how challenging it is to analyze and judge the role of private security in San Francisco. It’s become a blatantly visible issue amid the city’s discourse around crime, theft, and safety, and a growing number of businesses and residences are choosing to contract security guards as a de-facto way to police the gray area between public and private space.
You can see and feel it across the city, in a variety of neighborhoods like Union Square, the Mission, SoMa and Nob Hill. There are some 10,000 active guard licenses registered to operate in San Francisco, according to a 2022 review by the San Francisco Police Department. But details on where and how they operate remains extremely scarce.
That 2022 report was the result of a push from District 2 Supervisor Catherine Stefani, who had received reports of racial profiling, bias and aggressive behavior by guards, including toward a 12-year-old. In response, Stefani pointed to reviewing Article 25, a law requiring SFPD oversight over private security firms. Passed in 1972, it was never enforced in any way.
Then, in April 2023, 24-year-old Banko Brown was shot to death by a Walgreen’s security guard after an extended scuffle over a bag of snacks. In response, the Board of Supervisors passed legislation in October to amend the police code and only allow the unholstering of firearms for the defense of the guard and bystanders, not to protect property.
But digging into the policies proves that, beyond sending a message, there’s no teeth when it comes to enforcement, according to sources close to the legislation. The SFPD’s recommendations in the 2022 analysis largely asked for the city to let the state regulate private security, noting that understaffing and a slim budget leaves few resources for the department to track guards and incidents.
The next steps outlined in the report, including community outreach, have yet to be completed. And ironically, the October amendment only affected Article 25, which continues to be unenforced as a whole. If these were attempts to make private security less opaque, so far, they’ve had no impact at all.
To become a security guard, you have to be 18 years old, pass an FBI background check, and complete an eight-hour course online. You can work a licensed job from that point, without finishing the remaining 32 hours of training (including chapters on implicit bias and reasonable uses of force) for six months. If you complete a 16-hour firearms certification course, you can wear a pistol on your hip, too.
In theory, this is supposed to be enough to keep everyone safe, especially with an eight-hour refresher course mandated each year. In reality, the real oversight for training falls on the employer, which is tasked with tracking the additional coursework beyond the initial eight hours required for a basic “guard card.”
More than a half dozen private security firms contacted by Gazetteer SF did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails requesting comment on hiring and standards. But a number of guards around the city offered their takes, with many remarking on the lightweight nature of the state’s requirements.
“The training goes by quick, and you’re allowed to be out working well before you finish all the initial hours. It’s easier to get your guard card here than some other states,” said an armed guard working in the Mission who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to press. “I used to get jumpy out here. Nobody told me how aggressive people would be. And so many. But you figure it out.”
Another armed guard stationed in the Financial District noted that training was more of an “on the job, common sense” task for new guards. Both guards were unfamiliar with the October legislation limiting the use of their firearms to instances of self-defense — “My employer didn’t tell me anything about that,” the latter said.
But it was also up to him to uphold a certain ethical standard, he argued: “I just wouldn’t draw on someone just to get them out, or because they’re grabbing something to steal. It’s a defense-of-life issue. Either for me or for someone else.”
That attitude can differ between guards — and employers, too. The security firm in the Brown killing, Kingdom Group Protective Services, had actively pushed a “hands-on” approach to taking back property and resolving disputes, according to a report from the District Attorney. The lack of consistency means that, at the end of the day, it comes down to individual discretion: You could sit back and just report a theft, or you could escalate an interaction and pepper-spray someone in the face for arguing.
Although the state Bureau of Security and Investigative Services is tasked with resolving complaints, its woefully underpowered regulations mean that it cannot discipline guards and security firms for improper behavior beyond assigning them fines and suspending individual licenses. The 2020 killing of Mario Matthew in Sacramento by a group of guards led to a fine of just $2,500 for security firm Allied Universal. Elsewhere, Michael Earl-Wayne Anthony, the guard who killed Brown, was fined $1,500. He had used his gun despite a lapsed firearm certification.
This isn’t a surprise: In 2020, BSIS chief Lynne Andres observed that because the use of force by guards is not “clearly defined in statute,” the bureau has limited oversight. “The Private Security Services Act does not specify what level of force is considered acceptable,” she told Capital Public Radio. “The decision on how the security guard should react to any given situation is at the discretion of the security guard’s employer, and what is lawful regarding [citizen’s] arrest.”
In other words, even under the city’s October policy change, if a suspect behaves aggressively toward a guard, shooting back could likely fall under “self-defense” because of the state’s interpretation.
Perhaps the lack of clarity is why some major companies are backpedaling on security strategy: After telling the Board of Supervisors in 2021 that it was spending $10 million a year on private security in SF, Walgreens announced in a January 2023 earnings call that it was reverting to hiring law enforcement because “the security companies are proven to be largely ineffective.”
Once upon a time, San Francisco had something in between: the San Francisco Patrol Special Police, a service empowered by SFPD to operate as patrolling neighborhood guards. Unlike private security firms, the members of the SFPSP have radios that communicate with police dispatchers. Its last member, Alan Byard, retired on March 1 at the age of 69.
At that point, he had “around 200” clients around the Marina and Pacific Heights, he says; Byard’s main role was to drive around at night, passing by storefronts and homes looking for potential break-ins and other threats. He’s proud of the training demanded by the PSP, which includes 64 hours at the police academy as well as 24 hours of continuing education every year. Discipline for misconduct was overseen by the city police commission, and it published daily logs of its activities online since 2010.
The lack of rigor for private security firms can put guards in tricky and dangerous situations, Byard suggests. “Most security companies are told by their clients that they don’t want them doing much. They want them to observe and report, not to make an arrest or get involved,” he adds.
And yet, again and again, we see instances of that going out of control, including a fifth-grader being wrongly accused of stealing at a Safeway in the Castro (in 2021) and a guard escalating an argument with intimidation and pepper-spraying an upset customer. It doesn’t even have to involve retail risk — in another alleged instance of harassment in 2022, a pair of Legion security guards drove up onto a sidewalk in order to force an unhoused woman to move down the block. As a rule, armed private security isn’t supposed to “patrol” San Francisco streets. In practice, that’s what it often looks like.
This is why Byard hammers home the point of preparation: “We’ve always told the department to give us more training. To give us updates on laws and how they’re changing. And the best thing they could do was provide that,” he says. “It’s the training that lets you avoid serious altercations.”
But the stakes are highest when guard work means confronting not just crime, but also mental health emergencies and the symptoms of drug use and all manner of bad moods. These altercations keep unfolding in obscurity; even if the city wants to increase oversight, its efforts to do so aren’t gaining much ground or attention.
In the meantime, a swath of guards on an hourly wage are left largely to their own devices, relying on employers who have no duty to explain anything to the public at all.
