Safety

Americans regularly rank ‘reducing crime’ as one of their top concerns in political issue polls. Meanwhile, in reality, crime rates are hovering around their lowest rates in decades. Yet fear of crime is at its highest point in a long time. We talk a lot about the flawed perception of America (and, often, its cities) as hotbeds of criminality, and how politicians and the media stoke those fears to keep us divided. But there is another industry reaping vast riches from our panic: private security.

In Harpers, a journalist spent six months as a guard in New York City, the epicenter of private security:

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.

Allied, one of the biggest security firms, is also one of the largest private employers in the world. How did private security become so ubiquitous? One day comes to mind:

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.

Argenbright was one of the many small security firms tasked with duties that, in hindsight, should have been done by trained professionals making above minimum wage. This is not to blame the guards at all, as they were pawns in a predatory business model:

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.

Argenbright is also a close associate of Trump, and ran the security at his properties for years. Argenbright went on to found a new security firm in 2005 which he sold in 2021 to Allied.

Nor was his business model outside the norm - many such firms skirt training requirements and throw recruits into security roles with scant pay, grueling hours, and little equipment. The author reports that during his time at Allied - after he passed his ‘certification’ test via the instructor providing all the answers - he was only questioned by his superiors about his appearance and demeanor. Which really is the purpose of most private security - the appearance of safety, a human body in a lobby or by a door. Most of the guards are not meaningfully trained, in a constant state of stress and exhaustion, and not empowered to do much of anything to maintain the peace.

The lack of training and authority becomes more of a problem as companies (at the request of their clients) arm guards with deadly weapons. It has created a kinship with the police, in all the worst possible ways:

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.

In the past decade, hundreds of security guards have been arrested for manslaughter or murder. Despite billions spent and lives pointlessly lost, there is no indication any of this is having a positive impact on crime:

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.”

But it really isn’t about preventing crime - for the clients paying security firms to overwork and abuse their guards (the industry has an estimated six hundred percent yearly turnover), it’s about appearances. I’d never argue against providing honest jobs to millions of Americans, but private security is hardly a good use of their time and energy. A few companies are earning billions of dollars erecting underpaid, overworked scarecrows at the lobby of every bank and the door of every clothing store, and all it does is make people feel less safe.

Slumlords

I think we all vaguely understand that there are many slumlords in the world, and hope we don’t encounter them in our personal lives. I live in a city, and have heard horror stories about nightmare apartments. I have a friend who works in legal aid, through whom I discovered how common tenants’ rights cases are among low income renters. Slumlords take advantage of the poor and desperate because they, too, need housing, and don’t often have the resources to fight back.

The people who should be able to hold slumlords accountable, city and federal officials, seem equally powerless to rein them in. We’ve talked about the decades of suffering inflicted by the Puretz family, two of whom may finally be about to experience some personal consequences. Another notorious Philly slumlord is facing criminal charges, but not for the slumlording:

Prosecutors say [Philip Pulley] registered to vote in Philadelphia with a phony Social Security number while already being registered to vote at his mansion in Huntingdon Valley and at his waterfront house in Lighthouse Point, Fla.

Voting records recently reviewed by The Inquirer show that Pulley — a former longtime Republican now registered as a Democrat — appears to have doubled voted in the 2021 and 2023 elections, as well, casting votes in both Philadelphia and Montgomery County simultaneously.

In a truly bizarre twist, a millionaire slumlord who has evaded serious consequences for decades of criminal negligence, thought it would be a good idea to do voter fraud in Philadelphia, for no obvious reason. I don’t know what he thought his two extra votes would do in off-year local elections in two different counties, but I won’t argue with him finding a way to do something he might get arrested for.

As to what else Pulley has been up to, his web of shady LLCs has been running substandard apartments and dodging liability:

Eleven Philadelphia apartment buildings managed by Pulley’s company, SBG Management Services, were linked to nearly 1,000 building code violations, according to city records. City lawyers also went to court over SBG’s buildings more than 300 times between 2014 and 2024, either over maintenance issues or filing liens for unpaid utilities and delinquent taxes totaling more than $2.5 million.

Thousands of people have to live in the properties Pulley’s companies simply refuse to repair or maintain. They pay him for the privilege of living in buildings that occasionally collapse. Many of them may actually be illegal rentals:

In a 2018 Inquirer article that found that at least half of SBG’s properties did not have active rental licenses, Pulley claimed that he’s the victim of unruly tenants who destroy property, then call the Department of Licenses and Inspections (L&I) in a ploy to avoid paying rent.

Also, what is about these scumbags and stealing from their employees?

In August 2022, for example, city lawyers secured a default judgment in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court for $342,809 after Pulley failed to respond to a lawsuit alleging that he owed seven years’ worth of business income and wage taxes. He took out the wage taxes from his employees’ paychecks, the suit claims, but didn’t turn over the money to the city.

You would think that, given Pulley’s extensive list of legal judgements, the city could, you know, find a way to recover the money its owned? Nope!

Two years after that court judgment, Pulley has yet to comply, a city official recently said.

What good is a legal system that can’t enforce judgements against thieves? One imagines that if a non-millionaire owed the city money, it would simply garnish their paycheck or put a lien on their home, something of that nature. Yet, somehow, the guy who owns two mansions and a bunch of property companies can even dodge legal service:

For instance, a construction company filed a suit in March against SBG for failure to pay $116,000 for work done at Lindley Tower. The case has so far been unable to proceed. No one can get the lawsuit into the hands of Pulley or his attorney, despite repeated efforts.

You mean, the lawyer making statements to the fucking newspaper??

In a statement to The Inquirer, Pulley’s lawyer, Michael Yanoff, said that SBG managed properties provide a badly needed form of affordable housing “for many residents who are unable to obtain suitable housing elsewhere.”

Not to belabor the point, but it takes a truly vile person to make a living stealing money from desperate renters and their own employees, and using it to buy yachts and mansions rather than paying to repair their leaking ceilings, or exterminate the rats running through their walls. And, perhaps by design, our legal and regulatory systems seem to be wholly unequipped to deal with slumlords who simply refuse to ever pay up.

Antitrust

Here is a very funny lawsuit:

The lawsuit accused them of violating antitrust laws by seeking to “conspire, collude, price fix, and illegally overcharge Flannery” and forming “a secret conspiracy to drive up prices” by talking to each other about holding out for higher offers.

Sounds ominous, yes? What if I told you the plaintiff was a group of tech billionaires and investors who had been secretly buying up tens of thousands of acres of land sixty miles outside San Francisco to build their own city, and the defendants were a bunch of rural California landowners who don’t want them to do it? Cool, right?

The entire operation - called California Forever (??) - smacks of every half-baked attempt by wealthy tech founders to build their idea of a utopia. It’s run by a 36-year-old Goldman Sachs trader, raised $800 million dollars, and has tried to literally bulldoze a sparsely populated rural community. There’s also no plan on what they’re going to actually build.

That hasn’t stopped the group from attempting to change the county’s zoning laws with a local ballot measure which they spent nine million dollars to advertise. They were up against stiff opposition from the local resident’s group:

A poll commissioned in March by the opposition coalition, called Solano Together, of over 400 county voters found that 70% said they would vote against it. Voters were also highly aware of the issue and the investors, with three-quarters saying they had heard of California Forever. Solano Together spent about $20,000 to put up some yard signs and hand out stickers, according to Kromm. “In terms of bang for the buck, we won that one big time,” he says.

California Forever abruptly pulled the ballot measure in July, seemingly aware they were going to lose. Whoops.

Now, the investors’ plan is to ‘seek the necessary reports and approvals’ which you would think would have been the first steps before ‘rewrite the local laws’ or raising hundreds of millions, but no one has ever accused a tech investor of spending too much time planning. If they do the actual work (unlikely) they will try again on the 2026 ballot.

Which brings us back to the lawsuit. Basically, what happened was when Solano residents realized who was behind the wildly overmarket offers they had been receiving for their land and what those people planned to do with it, some of them decided to ask for even more money. In the view of California Forever, it is antitrust to have conversations with your neighbors about the rich weirdos trying to buy your land via a bunch of anonymous LLCs.

You cannot expect VCs and tech people to have any fucking sense of irony, but I hope they lose their dumb half billion-dollar lawsuit as resoundingly as they lost their first attempt to take over a county and build a dumb city in it.

Wishful Thinking

If you were the person in charge of presenting ExxonMobil financial projections to investors, and you were reading reports about how the world’s reliance on fossil fuels would decline precipitously in the next few decades, what would you do?

One option would be to create a presentation which emphasizes your company’s investments in green technologies, and explain how you are positioned to take advantage of a shift away from fossil fuels. This might make some of your investors happy, and people on Fox Business say mean things about you and accuse you of DEI. Your stock price would probably be fine, because 2050 is a long way away, right?

Another option would be to say, with a straight face, that nope, everyone else is lying:

ExxonMobil has said global oil demand will remain virtually unchanged by 2050 and warned that any move to curtail investment in fossil fuels would trigger a new energy price shock.

The implied threat is a nice move - you wouldn’t want an energy price shock, would you? Never mind that Exxon would profit handsomely from said shock.

In the same forecast, the company also said that carbon emissions would fall, because efficiency:

Despite continuing strong demand for oil and gas, Exxon forecast that carbon emissions would decline by 25 per cent by 2050 due to greater energy efficiency, the rollout of technologies such as carbon capture and renewables.

Right, yeah. Carbon capture! Renewables! The one thing that will definitely not happen is the world using less oil and gas. Says the company that sells oil and gas to the world.

For now, there is an argument to be made that we still need these fossil fuel companies, if only because someone has to run the pipelines and send tankers to gas stations and whatnot. But boy, it is hard to argue for their continued existence for too much longer.

Short Cons

Stat News - “Using dollops of investors’ cash and massive loans, private equity firms have taken over hundreds of hospitals, thousands of nursing homes, and tens of thousands of medical practices, leaving the hospitals, nursing homes, and practices — not the investors — on the hook to pay off the debt.”

NYT - “Mr. Musk’s attempt to rescue a company he saw as a sinking ship was premised on the idea that he could persuade people — millions of them — to pay for Twitter Blue.”

Data Center Dynamics - “Training ChatGPT as well as new models could cost as much as $3bn this year, according to financial documents seen by the publication. The company has ramped up the training of new AI faster than it had originally planned.”

Seattle Times - “The near-catastrophic midair blowout of a door-sized fuselage panel on an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 in January was caused by two distinct manufacturing errors by different crews on successive days last fall in Boeing’s assembly plant in Renton.”

CNBC - “Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, is being accused by environmental and health advocates of adding to the pollution problem in Memphis, Tennessee, by using natural gas burning turbines at its new data center, and doing so without a permit.”

TNR - “Meta—the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp—has just hired Dustin Carmack, a former adviser to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s doomed presidential campaign and an ex–Project 2025 employee.”

Vox - “Their NBER working paper, published on Monday, provides revealing information about the causes and consequences of teacher strikes in America, and suggests they remain a potent tool for educators to improve their working conditions.“