Private Eyes

Matt Breveleri guides his white Ford sedan through Boston's South End, along blocks that alternately belong to the haves and have-nots. After 30 years of gentrification, the housing stock in this compact neighborhood appears to be evenly divided now: Million-dollar condos and town houses. Housing projects and subsidized apartments. Little else. But Breveleri is one of the few assets held by the have-nots.

He directs a force of private cops responsible for policing more than 100 housing projects and low-income apartment buildings around Boston, including a large cluster of them in the South End. "That's ours," he says, pointing to the Grant Manor complex, six flat-roofed brick structures on Washington Street with all the graceful curves of a Soviet office building. "That's ours as well." Across the couple of dense blocks between Northampton Street and Melnea Cass Boulevard, Breveleri points out six housing complexes that his force patrols on foot every night, clearing the stairwells of hookers and their johns, teenagers and their weed.

In the early 1990s, his employer, Naratoone, started by a savvy immigrant from Nigeria, provided nothing more than janitorial services. It still furnishes workers to mop the floors and empty the trash, but these days there's a lot more interest in the workers who can arrest drug dealers and confiscate guns.

While shootings and murders continue to rise in Boston, an increase that police union officials have blamed partly on the reduced size of the Boston police force, there has been a quiet but unmistakable growth in the number of armed private cops at Naratoone and other companies like it. As in Iraq, primary policing duties for some of the diciest spots in Boston have been essentially subcontracted out to private firms. Naratoone's security force has tripled in three years. Now, in addition to 122 traditional security officers, it has 43 "special" police officers, who are armed and licensed by the Boston Police Department and who have limited arrest powers.

But as these private cops continue to expand their turf, operating with far less oversight than city cops, the line between the two policing worlds grows more murky. While many residents of housing projects welcome the extra security, they also say they'd prefer if they had actual Boston cops assigned to their properties, as is the case in at least one project. There have been a few notorious cases where cowboy private cops grossly exceeded their powers. In December, three special officers with Alliance Detective and Security Services were charged with assaulting a Dorchester man at gunpoint. They tried to arrest him for trespassing, even though he was outside his own building at the time.

Breveleri, who served as a State Police special officer and is a staff sergeant in the Army National Guard, knows it's exactly this sort of nonsense that makes people roll their eyes and huff, "Rent-a-cops!" As Naratoone's deputy chief of public safety, the 36-year-old presents himself as the new face of private policing: fit, connected, and professional. His addiction to weightlifting cost him his athletic scholarship at Northeastern University when he became too bulked-up for a 400-meter runner. His police and military credentials have won him access to city police leaders, and his Puerto Rican heritage helps him engage the minority community he polices. He holds nightly roll calls with his force and shows up at community task force meetings in pressed pants and shoes as shiny as his shaved head, taking careful notes, reviewing crime statistics, and crowding his sentences with policing acronyms.

Still, as eager as Breveleri is to move his field forward, there are obstacles. He's dealing with private cops who earn about $17 an hour - $9 an hour for unarmed security guards - and drive secondhand cruisers. While his roll calls feature some fit, professional-looking men and women, there are also a rumpled few who look as if they just finished a shift patrolling the mall food court sucking down a large Orange Julius. All his special police officers have to go through a training program run by the nonprofit Massachusetts Reserve Police Federation, one of three programs approved by the city. But a recent phone call to that Tewksbury outfit produced a message that the number had been disconnected, and a visit to its website revealed a home page decorated with cheesy "Do Not Cross" police tape and the sounds of blaring sirens and screeching brakes. Not exactly the message you want to be sending to gain acceptance from your brothers in blue.

Even though private cops have arrest powers, they are limited - and the biggest troublemakers in the neighborhood know that. For one thing, private cops can't transport people they've arrested and have to call Boston Police to do that. For another, their arrest powers extend only as far as the property they're patrolling - not an inch more.

Breveleri turns his Ford cruiser onto Shawmut Avenue and points to Mandela Homes. The complex has 276 apartments in two clusters, one block apart. As part of Naratoone's security contract, the private cops have to walk up and down each stairwell in each building, in both clusters, every night. But as soon as they step out of one cluster and onto Shawmut Avenue to walk to the next cluster, their arrest powers vanish. Breveleri says his officers dread the sneers and jeers they get making that one-block walk each night as much as the drug dealers and winos who line this stretch of Shawmut relish seeing them have to make it. He shakes his head and smiles. "This is no man's land."

WHETHER STANDING GUARD at a bank or a department store, the special police officer has been around Boston for more than a century. Today, about 125 armed special officers are employees of city agencies like the Municipal Police, a force that patrols parks and is targeted for elimination, or the Boston Housing Police, a dwindling force responsible for city-owned public housing projects like Old Colony in South Boston. Another 100 armed special officers work for private companies like Naratoone, which mostly patrols private, federally subsidized housing complexes.

What has changed in recent years - dramatically but with remarkably little notice or analysis - is that so many special officers are now on the front lines in the city's high-crime neighborhoods. Mark Cohen, the head of licensing for the Boston Police Department, says the division of labor generally works like this: "We do the streets, they do private property."

Nationwide, the private security industry now employs more guards, patrol officers, and detectives than federal, state, and local governments combined, according to a review by David A. Sklansky of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. The buildup has accelerated since 9/11. But the growth of front-line private cops in Boston is different. It has more to do with a massive, decade-long program to rehab or rebuild 11 of Boston's most-deteriorated federally funded housing projects. From the beginning of that half-a-billion-dollar program, which wrapped up at the end of 2004, private armed security was brought in to guard the properties and protect residents. Eventually, many of the armed guards were licensed as special officers, so that they would have arrest powers. After the complexes were rebuilt and turned over to tenant ownership and property management companies, most decided to keep on the private cops, even though that now meant paying for them with rent money rather than straight from the federal treasury.

Thaddeus Miles was part of that initial security force. Just before Christmas in 1993, he and a few guards were making their first patrol through the corridors of the Grant Manor project. Floors one, two, and three were uneventful. But on the fourth floor, Miles opened the fire door leading out of the stairwell and immediately came upon 20 young guys, wearing ski masks that covered everything but their eyes. Crime was rampant at the time, and Miles had no idea if these guys had guns. "It was a frightening experience for me," he admits. And know this: Miles is 6 foot 4, weighed 250 pounds at the time, played college football as a defensive end, served in the military, and had trained in martial arts since he was 8. "There's not much I'm afraid of." Also, he was armed, as were the three officers with him. As it turned out, the 20 guys "were just talking, doing their thing, smoking their weed," he says. "But what gave me a chill was thinking, 'How do the residents deal with this every day?' That's when it dawned on me that they're living with a whole different kind of fear."

Since then, Miles has been working to reduce the reasons for that fear. At its best, he says, private security can capture the spirit of neighborhood policing, with officers getting to know the residents and their concerns. But that takes training, commitment, and a little humility.

Miles is now director of public safety for MassHousing, the agency that ran the massive rehab program for the feds. He says private cops and surveillance cameras may not produce an overall drop in crime so much as push it off the property in question. For residents desperate to get in and out of their homes unmolested, sometimes that's enough.

Gloria Bowers lived through it all. The rodents, the leaks, the shootings. When she moved into the old Academy Homes II project in Roxbury in 1977, the poorly constructed complex of precast concrete was already falling apart. It would only get worse. Today, life is better. The old federally funded project was razed and replaced with New Academy Estates, 236 tidy clapboard town houses with slanted roofs and curb appeal. "It's much quieter now," says Bowers, the 56-year-old president of the tenant board. "You don't hear gunshots at night, and if you do, it's not coming from here."

For more than a year, Naratoone has been providing security for the new complex. "In the beginning, there was a lot going on, and Naratoone was nowhere to be found," says Bowers, sitting in her cozy living room. "But now I think they're doing a good job." She likes the youth programs the company has brought to Academy, such as its safety training for young kids. And she feels that Naratoone's regular patrols and cameras help keep a lot of crime out of the sprawling complex.

Bowers's 17-year-old nephew, Reggie, who lives with her, comes down the stairs and makes his way out the door. I ask him if he agrees with his aunt that Naratoone is basically doing a good job.

"Not really," he says. "They always get the wrong people."

Talk to enough residents of subsidized housing, and you detect an age gap in how they view private police. While adults tend to appreciate the security, however imperfect, many teens complain of "rent-a-cops" on power trips telling them where they can and can't go. They talk about teens being arrested for trespassing on their own property.

The cops say the only way to maintain order in high-crime housing areas is to keep away the worst offenders, who make life miserable for all the decent people around them. If those offenders aren't residents, either the private cops or property management can secure trespass orders barring them from the property. Violations lead to arrest. But teens aren't the only ones who see these trespass orders as an invitation for private cops to abuse power. "These people aren't made accountable," says Lisa Thurau-Gray, a lawyer with the Juvenile Justice Center at Suffolk University Law School. "With private security, management is purchasing a cheap fix. Sometimes it works. But when it doesn't, it's a catastrophe for people."

MATT BREVELERI IS DRIVING ALONG Columbus Avenue in Roxbury now, pointing to a 200-unit housing project called Academy Homes I. Even though it sits less than a hundred yards from Gloria Bowers's new town house, the complex did not make the cut of projects rehabbed by the federal government. So residents there still live in the same concrete apartments that were erected in 1965. Breveleri would like to see Academy I become a Naratoone client, but that isn't likely to happen. Academy I already has its own dedicated cops. They just happen to work for the Boston Police Department.

Two Boston patrolmen are based out of Academy I, walking the beat, attending community meetings, getting to know the good seeds and the bad eggs by face and by name. In other words, practicing neighborhood policing. While their beat encompasses more than just Academy I, there's no denying that it's the turf they look after most. This unusual arrangement began about 12 years ago, when the gang war between Academy and the neighboring Bromley-Heath project was particularly bad. Later, when Boston headquarters tried to move the cops out of Academy, the residents there raised enough hell to keep them.

People who live in high-crime neighborhoods often complain about being neglected by Boston police, seeing them only when they swoop in like an alien force after a high-profile crime has been committed and they need help in solving it. But the residents of Academy I see their beat officers every day and can turn to them for assistance as well as protection.

Boston Police and union officials say that the current force of 2,000 is too small, never mind trying to spread the Academy I approach to housing projects across the city. That may be true, though it's hard to step into the well-staffed fortress that is Boston Police headquarters and not wonder how much better things could be if more of those bodies were reassigned to the front lines.

Until that happens, many residents of Boston's toughest neighborhoods will have to live with private policing. They may not be getting cops whose badges have the same power and resources behind them as city cops. But when they step out their door, they'll at least see someone with a badge.

Neil Swidey is a staff writer for the Globe Magazine. E-mail him at swidey@globe.com.