Phillip Zobel

Phillip Zobel is the editorial byline for the HireSecurityNow research desk. Guides published under this name are researched and maintained by our editorial team against primary sources, and each one carries its own source list so you can check the work rather than take our word for it.

The method is deliberately narrow. Licensing facts come from the state agencies that issue the licenses — the regulator, the license a company must hold, guard and armed-officer training minimums, insurance floors and the official lookup URL — recorded per state rather than generalized into a single national rule that does not exist. Where a state does not license security companies at all, we say so instead of sending readers to a registry that isn't there.

Crime figures come from the FBI Crime Data Explorer and, for neighborhood-level breakdowns, from cities' own published incident data. We publish the methodology, and we flag cities whose agency reporting is too sparse to draw conclusions from rather than quietly averaging past the gap.

Pricing is the one area where precision is not honest. Bill rates move with local wage floors, scope and risk, so every figure is presented as a market range and labeled as such — never as a survey statistic it isn't.

We publish under an editorial byline rather than inventing individual author personas. If you find something wrong, tell us: we correct it and update the review date on the page.