What is use of force?
Use of force by a security officer is limited to what the law permits any citizen — reasonable force in defined circumstances such as self-defence or preventing crime. A contract cannot extend that.
Nothing in an SIA licence or a client instruction authorises force beyond the legal position. An instruction to remove someone is an instruction to ask them to leave, not an authorisation to make them.
Reasonableness is judged on the circumstances as the officer honestly believed them to be, which is why what an officer perceived and why is central to any account of an incident.
Training in physical intervention exists for the situations that occur despite de-escalation, and it is refreshed because the skill and the legal understanding both decay.
In practice
A supermarket entrance, a detained shoplifter, two officers.
The incident lasts under a minute. What is written afterwards decides everything that follows: the account of what led up to it, what was said, what was tried, and what was done, in sequence and in plain description.
What must not be in the record is a conclusion that it was reasonable. That is a question of law decided on the facts by somebody else, and an officer's own assessment of it is the first sentence anybody will take apart.
The section that most often decides these cases is the one before the contact — the warnings given, the distance kept, the exit offered — because it is the part nobody thinks to write down.
What goes wrong in practice
- Client instructions treated as authorisation for force.
- Incidents written up without recording what the officer perceived at the time.
- Physical intervention training completed once and never refreshed.