Authority
A lot of this falls under life skills and common sense, rather than law per se. If you've lived and worked in skyscrapers and laboratories and corporate environments these are things you just come to know. Maybe some of this comes from being a Boy Scout growing up as well.
Calling 911
Usually there would be a law prohibiting employment retaliation against someone making a legitimate report to law enforcement, but an employer might reasonably suggest when it is and is not appropriate to do so.
Outright stopping someone from calling 911 when it is appropriate to do so would probably constitute obstruction of justice or something similar.
Private Security
There are a variety of tasks normally performed by private security in a business.
- Routine patrol to make sure that nothing is amiss and that only authorized people are in the building;
- excluding trespassers with non-deadly force if necessary;
- maintaining awareness of neighborhood security threats (e.g. protest marches, repeated crime incidents where employees go)
- investigating property crimes on the property after reporting the to law enforcement for insurance purposes (which usually has a policy of not investigating small dollar crimes reported to them themselves);
- maintenance and monitoring of security cameras;
- organizing fire wardens, scheduling fire drills and scheduling real fire department inspections of the premises when required;
- response to disturbances (if necessary notifying police);
- confirming that doors that should be locked are locked;
- alerting emergency services of fires and crimes in progress or observed;
- greeting legitimate employees and guests;
- supervising outside maintenance people; and
- providing minor first aid, and getting someone to health care when an ambulance is not necessary and calling for one when it is not.
Their objective is to serve the company's needs, but often, those heavily overlap with the public's need in the area of security and safety.
Fire Wardens
A "fire warden" in an office building is responsible for:
- passing on information from the fire department that employees in the fire warden's unit need to know;
- to be alert to identify and remedy fire code violations that are identified in inspections (e.g. fire extinguishers that are no longer certified, alarm signals that are broken or need new batteries);
- to understand and communicate how to respond to a fire alarm and to distinguish between scheduled tests of the equipment and true drills;
- to supervise the conduct of fire drills and non-drill evacuations;
- to make sure that everyone knows the meet up location following a true fire; and
- to keep track of who gets out, who was never at work in the first place when there was an evacuation, and who was unable to escape.
A "fire warden" is basically a responsible civilian who coordinates with the fire department which does real inspections and responds to real fires.
In contrast, any competent person calls the fire department when there is a real fire that requires response and/or rescue.
Any competent person might put out a fire in progress, but a fire warden would be told standard operating procedure for follow up response after an emergency fire or incident is dealt with as a putting out a visible fire in a complex urban or commercial environment is often not sufficient to know that the threat is gone.
Often a fire warden would insist that the fire department be called even though there was no visible ongoing threat. This is particularly important in high rises, commercial kitchens and industrial buildings.
