What you should come away with: being able to state what a security guard may and may not lawfully do when directed to move someone along — and hold that line under pressure from a client.
For Security Guards
Contents
Draft — pending legal review. Do not rely on this section for operational or legal decisions. The headings below are a scaffold; the legal statements they will carry have not been verified. This notice comes off only after sign-off by California counsel.
Read the rest of the guide first
Everything in the rest of this guide applies to you, and most of what goes wrong on a post is covered there rather than here. This section only adds what is true for security guards and false for everyone else.
Guards face this more often than any other occupation, under more pressure, and with a uniform that leads people — including the guard — to believe the authority is greater than it is. That gap is the entire subject of this section.
This is a guide, not a certification. Reading it earns no BSIS credit and satisfies no training requirement. A certified course is a separate thing, and it does not exist yet.
The guard's position
Covers:
- Post orders versus the law. When your post orders direct something you may not lawfully do, the law wins and the post orders need to change — and how to raise that with a supervisor.
- Client pressure. “Just get rid of them” is not a lawful instruction, and complying with it exposes you personally, not just the client.
- What the uniform confers: presence and credibility. What it does not confer: any police power whatsoever.
- Impersonation exposure — commands, gestures, equipment and language that read as law enforcement.
Not written yet.
Guard-specific law
2. The Law and Your Limits covers what every private person shares. These are the statutes that come up on a post specifically. Each one is on the list for legal review before this page is published as finished.
Trespass — Penal Code 602
Covers: the specific subdivisions that actually apply on a guard's post; notice requirements; what a lawful request to leave sounds like; and what happens, procedurally, when it is refused.
Citizen's arrest and its limits — Penal Code 837
Covers: when it is available at all, and the far longer list of what a guard may not do — force, restraint, searching a person or their property, seizing or discarding belongings. Both personal and employer liability attach here, and this is the most common source of both.
Grants Pass on a private post
Covers: 2.6 explains what City of Grants Pass v. Johnson (2024) held. The point for guards is narrower and more often gotten wrong: it governs municipal enforcement on public land and does not expand a private guard's authority by one inch. Expect clients and colleagues to believe otherwise.
Reporting, recording and the police handoff
Covers: what you can tell responding officers and how to describe it, body-worn or phone recording where the employer permits it, and the documentation standards from 5.4 as they apply to a guard's report specifically.
Not written yet.
Situations on a post
Work these after the three in 6. Situations. All three turn on authority, which is what makes them guard situations.
The client who wants it handled now
Situation: the property manager tells you to remove a person and their belongings from the loading dock before the tenants arrive, and to “throw that junk out.”
What it turns on: post orders versus the law, belongings as property (2.4), citizen's arrest limits, and how you say no to a client without losing the account or the job.
The sidewalk
Situation: a tent has gone up on the public sidewalk directly outside the property line you are posted to guard. Your client says it is your problem.
What it turns on: where the property actually ends (2.2), what Grants Pass did and did not change, and who the correct caller is — which may be nobody.
The refusal that escalates
Situation: a lawful request to leave is refused, the person stands up and moves toward you, and a small audience of employees is filming.
What it turns on: disengagement (3.3), the line between defending yourself and detaining someone, when this becomes a 911 call, and what your report says afterward (5.4).
Not written yet.