I had lunch to today with Richard Rosenfeld, the Curators Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Rosenfeld is smart guy and a serious figure in his field, who next year will become president of the American Society of Criminology.

Joining us was Terry Korpal, a former St. Louis city cop and U.S. Secret Service agent, now a private security consultant who also has been a teaching colleague of Rosenfeld.

The two are in the planning stages of research that should be of interest to many parts of this community. It concerns private security and seeks to answer some basic questions:

Does it prevent or suppress crime?

The two argue that as a society we spend a fortune on private security — if I heard them right, far more in the aggregate than what we provide for conventional police protection.

But we don’t follow in any systematic way whether it is effective.

We post untold numbers of watchmen at filing stations and convenience stores, for example. No doubt it makes people feel safer, which in itself is valuable.

But does that keep robberies down? Nobody knows.

Rosenfeld and Korpal work is in its fledgling stage, but that shouldn’t prevent other interested parties from seeing if they can get in on the ground floor.

For example, an editorial on The Platform in June discussed the growing trend of neighborhoods forming special taxing districts for the purpose of paying for private security as a supplement to police protection.

The experience of these districts could be a rich source of data — helping taxpayers to assess the best potential and strategies for this kind of crime fighting tool.

(Pictured: St. Louis Galleria Security guard Ken Oliver (right) checks the identifications of Tara Lemp (left) of Florissant and Destiny Clarke (center) of Normandy as they enter the mall in 2007. Odell Mitchell Jr. /Post-Dispatch)