Sorry to once again use you as a writer's resource, like in the cities for urban fantasy ask, but with your background in security, I wanted to ask: Have you ever had experience with doing security for a site that's being protested in some form or another? I'm curious what the tipping point typically is for "Don't call the cops because filing an incident report isn't worth it at this point" into "Nope, not getting paid enough for this shit, pass me the radio."
I haven't had that adventure yet myself, but I've spoken with those who have, and done a lot of training based on that, and read a lot of accounts over on the industry subreddits.
So, not every company/site is well organized, so if you want to write a guard being paid barely over minimum wage, barely giving a shit, and having zero interest in physical risk, you can totally do that and have it ring true. I suggest that you have the guard use their last bit of caring to try to call their management and not get through as usual, for full context of how shitty their company is. Having to use their own car as a patrol vehicle (oh no not my car!) or not having ever been issued uniform trousers that fit are other ways to indicate a shitty security company.
However, on a better organized account like my current employer, there is plenty of training about protests, and exactly what is legal protest, and what to do, and we have a little in-house intelligence and threat analysis department that lets us know about protests ahead of time, so it's easier to make sure that the guards who are on during a protest are prepared and the adrenaline junkies and the A team rather than lazy cowards.
If there's a peaceful, legal protest across the street, we document the shit out of it. By which we mean we write about it in reports and watch the cameras near it closely, call management so they know about it, that kind of thing.
If the protest turns violent and people start doing illegal stuff like breaking into buildings and stealing stuff, security is explicitly supposed to retreat to a safe place. They follow the post orders and their managers when they nope on out! Generally speaking, companies really really don't want employees to get hurt or killed on the job, because that's expensive.
The starting point of illegal stuff is stuff like, verbally threatening employees, trespassing, blocking parking or entrances. Now, it's pretty traditional for striking workers on picket lines to walk back and forth veeeery slooowly on the sidewalk in front of the vehicle entrance to whatever they're protesting, and they're legally allowed to do that and it's not legal to hit them with a car, so it's legal to get right up to the line of "blocking the parking entrance".
Also, security is a very ethnically and politically diverse industry at the guard level, but mostly looks down on and resents violent protesting regardless of what group is doing it, even if it's a group they might otherwise be expected to be sympathetic to given their ethnicity or political views.
Also, I've never heard of security getting access to the police radio channels, we call 911 same as everyone else. Might be different in the states where security has limited arrest powers though. (generally, it's only if you personally saw the arrestee commit a crime on the property you are an on the clock guard for).
