Within the last two decades, policing has changed radically as the production of public security, once the sole domain of the state police, is now being provided by a host of non-state police actors or private security companies, a development known as plural policing. While there is a growing corpus of scholarship examining plural policing, the majority of this work is dominated by Anglo-American viewpoints. As such, there is an existing gap in plural policing scholarship in Southern contexts. To address this lacuna, the current study utilized a qualitative approach aimed at understanding plural policing in Trinidad and Tobago. Senior personnel (N = 15) from private security companies were interviewed and their narratives analyzed and used to answer five research questions. The results indicate a host of benefits, challenges, functions, roles, and contributions to National Security as well as safety and security due to plural policing practices in Trinidad and Tobago. Three themes emanated from the study (collaboration, limitedness of state policing, and wide usage of plural policing services) and these are presented and discussed. This study has implications for “policing” in both the narrow and broad contexts.
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