Brussels, 12/01/2011 (Agence Europe) - There are more private security officers than police officers in almost a dozen member states, says a report published on Monday 10 January by the Confederation of European Security Services (CoESS) and the Belgian Private Security Association (APEG-BVBO). The report reveals that the sector grew by 12% in the EU in 2009, with currently 1.9 million private officers working for “60,000 private companies in Europe”. The expansion has been most marked in the new member states, the report notes. This, it says, may be explained by the budgetary constraints being faced by governments, forcing more and more security and crime fighting jobs to be sub-contracted. Within the context of growing public-private partnerships, the CoESS calls for standards of quality and training common to all 27 member states and harmonisation criteria, before ultimately seeking to end the exclusion of the private security sector from the scope of the directive on services in the internal market, said CoESS Director Marc Pissens. (O.L./transl.rt)