Now I know that Alan Coren wrote this is an ironic tone, but its not such a bad idea …

"You will say, hang on, the rich can already hire private security men to do this, but that is not the same thing at all: partly because private security men are not empowered to arrest, partly because they cannot even adequately confront, given that they are not permitted to carry weapons, but mainly because most of them have either recently come out of Parkhurst themselves, or know a gang who have. Nor would they be any use if a rich man’s cat went missing, or the people next door were pledging their troth too noisily, or there was something about the relief milkman which struck the rich man as iffy. If any such cloud were to appear on the rich man’s horizon, he should be able to ring Scotland Yard, bark a credit card number, and be moved instantly to the head of the Pending Inquiries waiting-list.

I would go further: even when an arrest is made, it is often the case these days that an inept judge, flash lawyers, inexpert witnesses and a thick jury will let the criminal off, accepting his defence that he found your Modigliani in a skip, or was simply performing a generous deed because your wife’s tiara appeared to be uncomfortably entangled in her hair. Clearly, this outcome is totally unacceptable: if you are in the fortunate position of being able to afford it, you should be allowed to hire your own private judge and jury, so that the man your own private policeman has arrested will be found guilty as charged, manacled as painfully as possible, and sent down for the term you have specified on your order form. Or, in really irritating cases, hanged by you personally: you would not of course be allowed to hang him by the neck until he was dead, but he could dangle for a bit, certainly until it put the roses in his cheeks."

The whole article is here