When stepping into a local library to pick up a new book or use the provided internet access or take your child to a storytime hour, a security officer might not be the first person you expect to see. But at libraries in Wake County, that’s almost guaranteed to be the case.
Wake County Public Libraries, the largest public library system in the state and serving the largest North Carolina county by population, is operating at a budget that includes $1.43 million in funds allocated toward security personnel as of Fiscal Year 2026, according to records obtained by Carolina Public Press.
Just six years ago in FY20, Wake allocated $348,818 to security.
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The heightened FY26 budget allows for consistent security presence at Wake’s 23 library locations. Senior Manager of Facilities and Operations at WCPL Mark Engelbrecht told CPP that not all locations have the same level of security at all times, but every library has an officer present during at least some of the operating hours depending on the needs of that particular location.
All libraries have security coverage during the last three hours of day-to-day operations, though others have coverage from open to close. One library’s guard, Oberlin Regional located in Raleigh’s Village District neighborhood, is even armed.
The libraries have no official ties to a local police force — guards are on a contract basis with outside security firm Allied Universal through Wake County. Allied did not respond to questions from CPP about the training their guards undergo, though Engelbrecht said there is a more extensive process for armed guards.
This is an approach many library systems and other public facilities have adopted to deter crime, Engelbrecht said. It also serves as a backup option on days there is a staffing shortage.
“It tends to be a nice deterrent towards any incidents, rather than an actual response to a lot of incidents,” he said.
“In some cases, it is a direct response to a significant number of incidents. But in many of our locations where they don’t have a lot of challenges, it’s a nice deterrent.”
Records obtained by CPP show the number of “serious incidents” at each Wake County library since FY2020. The records indicated 17 types of situations that could be considered serious incidents that require a security presence, ranging from a fire system alarm to suspicious person reports to weapon detection.
The vast majority of WCPL locations have experienced around 10 or fewer incidents per year over the last five years, with many recording zero incidents for several years in a row. But some locations diverge drastically from those statistics.
Richard B. Harrison Library on Raleigh’s New Bern Avenue reached 63 incidents in FY2025. Oberlin Regional Library in the Village District saw 36 incidents during the same time frame, a decline from 45 the year before. Green Road Community Library also steadily rose to 21 incidents in the most recent year after recording just two incidents four years earlier.
Engelbrecht said guards are encouraged to use deescalation tactics when such incidents do arise, but they are always recorded so that WCPL knows where the highest need is so guards can be reassigned to locations as necessary.
The policing of libraries has been a subset of the national conversation around racialized police brutality that took place during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. During that time, some U.S. cities saw activism for “cop-free libraries” that called for their local public libraries to divest from police and invest in social workers instead.
Organizations like the Library Freedom Project also seek to empower librarians to protect the privacy and intellectual freedom of their patrons without surveillance from “Big Tech” and law enforcement.
Vanessa Irvin, an associate professor in the Master of Library Science program at East Carolina University, said surveillance has been a part of the legacy of librarianship for as long as she’s been in the industry. This can be observed in something as seemingly harmless as the “shushing librarian” stereotype.
From as far back as the 19th century, libraries were in part about educating the masses on nobility culture and how to operate in a public space, Irvin said. The lesson was the library space should be quiet and individuals should regulate and contain their behavior in such areas on their own.
As the Industrial Revolution developed, children and young people became more solidified in culture as their own group with their own identity. It was then that behavior had to be systematically contained in public spaces like libraries, rather than expecting children to self-regulate as adults were expected to, Irvin said.
Irvin has always known guards to have a place in libraries in her decades on the job, though she has felt the motive behind policing in libraries shift from a desire to control adolescents to being more of a response to public health concerns.
“In terms of the surveillance of libraries, I really, in my humble opinion, believe that the original impetus for it was to control adolescent behavior,” she said.
“That has since morphed though in recent decades, let’s say 30 to 40 years, where social issues have become more prevalent or more obvious in the public sphere. And so you get people who have various health problems — be it mental health, behavioral health, cognitive health — that come into the library, which is their right to do, but their behavior may not be conformative to the collective norms of a library, therefore surveillance and policing of behavior that is not ‘of the norm’ has become more prevalent now.”
President of the American Library Association Sam Helmick said libraries are reflections of the communities they serve, so what the nation experiences is often echoed there — Helmick pointed to the opioid epidemic and widening class divisions as modern examples.
These issues arise in libraries in their own unique ways, and there isn’t exactly a one-size-fits-all way of approaching them.
“When libraries try to continuously serve as that third place … where our community comes together, we are asked to sort of help resolve some of those friction points,” Helmick said.
“To that end, making sure that folks feel fed, making sure that folks feel safe, making sure that libraries are spaces for the uses of the entire community — regardless of what that use may be — can be really tricky, and I think it’s something we’ve been trying to reconcile as a profession for, I’d say about 15 years.”
“Third place” is a sociological term that refers to an environment where one is able to go that isn’t their home and their work or school, particularly somewhere they can gather with their friends and broader community. Some believe a true third place to be somewhere with no expectation to make a purchase in order to be there — like a library.
Because libraries often serve as a community hub beyond being a place to check out books for free — some even have medical tents and food pantries on site — it makes sense to have more of a security presence due to libraries having more daily visitors than city hall, for example, Helmick said.
Just as police and security can be a deterrent for crime, it can also be a deterrent for those simply wanting to use the library’s resources, Helmick said.
While guards and other security measures like metal detectors are a response to real issues that aren’t being solved at the federal level, they can still be seen as barriers for some trying to get resources or simply exist at the library, Helmick said.
“Another part of you recognizes that for every single barrier that we put, we’re delaying a reader, and a reader delayed is a reader denied,” Helmick said.
Younger patrons in particular tend to feel turned off by a security presence because they often already feel as though they are being policed and surveilled at school and don’t want to have a continuation of that experience after school or on the weekends at the library, Irvin said.
But Irvin has seen guards have a positive impact on a library space and the patrons when guards are from the community they serve or make a conscious effort to get to know the area and the library’s visitors.
“One of the things that I loved about being a public librarian is that you got the opportunity to get to know your patrons, and they become a part of your everyday work life and a work family, really,” Irvin said.
“Therefore, then you get the community to buy-in to the safety of the library. I’ve worked with guards where we’ve helped feed people, help clothe people. … I’ve seen a lot of positive responses in terms of the guards, because, again, they wind up caring about the community, especially if they’re a member of the community.”
On the microcosmic level, the guard-librarian relationship can make or break the environment of the library and the compatibility of the overall community, Irvin said.
“It’s been my experience that in running a library, when you have a good guard and a good librarian, they make a great team in making sure that the library is safe, welcoming, clean, hospitable,” she said.
“If you have a good guard and a strong branch manager, I’ve seen where that has been a heck of a team.”
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