He seems unaware of the flutter of anxiety spreading through the store, but if anyone asked, which they don’t, he’d assure them that he’s there for their own good.
“We’re not here to beat people up,” says Boyer, who heads S.I.T.E, a private protection agency that is patrolling gas stations and hotels in Philadelphia at the behest of store owners. “We’re here to let the public know that they can feel safe.”
Boyer’s armed-guard service has boomed over the past year as Philadelphia police staffing issues led to longer response times. Neil Patel, who owns the gas station, hired Boyer in December after thieves stole an ATM and the police didn’t respond for six hours.
Across the country, police departments that already were struggling to recruit new applicants saw a spike in retirements and a drop-off in new recruits after the 2020 murder of George Floyd and subsequent backlash against police, says Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. The number of sworn officers dropped 7% from 2019 to 2021 nationwide, according to FBI data.
Meanwhile, crime was rising in many parts of America. Murders, assaults, and car thefts rose nationally in 2020, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, and first responders found themselves busy confronting crises such as homelessness and opioids. These factors bolstered a private security industry that had already been growing steadily since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Since 2020, it’s soared.
Denne historien er fra May 22 - 29, 2023 (Double Issue)-utgaven av Time.
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Denne historien er fra May 22 - 29, 2023 (Double Issue)-utgaven av Time.
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Kate Winslet Puts Lee Miller in the Frame - Kate Winslet loves tables. She loves them so much that the Oscar-winning actor collects them.
Kate Winslet loves tables. She loves them so much that the Oscar-winning actor collects them. There is nothing fancy about these antiques, but they enchant her. "It's the knots and the whorls, the shape and feel," she says. "They can feel like old friends, and there is something emotionally charging about an old table that comes with a history-I find imagining what that might be enormous fun."
Alfonso Cuarón Goes Long - The Oscar-winning filmmaker finds pathos in our lonely present in his first TV miniseries
A perceptive, generous-spirited child draws on her imagination when she's subjected to the cruelty of a boarding-school headmistress. A lone astronaut, cradled in a damaged space capsule and having lost any hope of returning to Earth, experiences a hallucination that saves her life. A young household servant, abandoned by the man who's gotten her pregnant, miscarries-though his betrayal helps her define what family truly means to her. Loneliness, so universal it has virtually become trademarked the Human Condition, is everywhere in art, and in life: we tend to fetishize it, or at least dab it with a perfume of sentimentality. But Alfonso Cuarón, now more than 30 years into a wide-ranging career that spans pictures like the Frances Hodgson Burnett adaptation A Little Princess, the space reverie Gravity, and the memoir-as-film drama Roma, is more interested in subtle emotional textures, in gradations of feeling that are always specific to the character at hand yet also joltingly recognizable. And now he brings his big-screen, big-story gifts to a limited series, an adaptation of Renée Knight's 2015 psychological thriller Disclaimer.
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