Volunteering within the Police: Summary

Key Findings 1. Volunteers bring a range of skills that are useful for the police. Many want to use these skills; however, some want to explore volunteering opportunities that are new to them. A skills analysis of new volunteers will be highly useful, but some will want to do something completely different. 2. Motivations for volunteering vary, from wanting the join the Regulars through to just wanting to do something worthwhile. Managers need to be aware of these differences. 3. Most volunteers enjoy their time with the police and get a lot out of it; yet some feel underused or under-informed, a concern for volunteer retention. 4. Volunteers are generally complementary about their supervision and have good relations with other volunteers and with Regular officers. 5. Special Constables and PSVs see their role as being in support of Regular officers. Whilst this supporting role is important, so too are their roles in improving legitimacy, providing a ‘bridge’ between the regulars and communities, and in making the police more representative of communities. 6. PSVs generally see their role as quite different to the Regulars, and so when asked about PSVs potentially being given powers, most are against the idea

Citizens in policing:The lived reality of being a Police Support Volunteer

The focus of this article is the Police Support Volunteer (PSV), a brand of non-warranted and usually non-uniformed volunteer that was introduced in England and Wales from the 1990s onwards. The article draws on participatory action research with PSVs in Lancashire Constabulary. The background to greater use of volunteers within policing is discussed with particular reference to the political projects of austerity and responsibilisation – the later involving calls for citizens to take greater responsibility for their own safety and security. In these contexts, the article considers volunteers’ motivations, skills and deployment. The article focuses particularly on the lived reality of being a PSV, including the assumed role of PSVs within the wider police family. A subordinate relationship with other paid colleagues within the police family is challenged. The effective use of PSVs is discussed, including the introduction of police powers for volunteers with the 2017 Policing and Crime Act. Implications for our understanding of policing, and for the future of non-warranted volunteers, are discussed

What are the police for? Re-thinking policing post-austerity

In the context of the global financial crisis and after inheriting a record budget deficit, the British Coalition Government decided in 2010 that the best way forward was a programme of austerity. What followed were major cuts to public expenditure, including a substantial reduction in police budgets. Whether this was the right decision is beyond the remit of this chapter. However, the effect on the police has been substantial. The police in Britain had enjoyed a sustained period of growth – both in terms of police numbers and increased responsibilities undertaken by police personnel – despite increases in competition and falls in recorded crime (Millie and Bullock, 2012; Millie, 2013). This was to change. In Scotland cuts came through the merging of all eight forces into a single Police Service of Scotland (Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012). With the 2010 Comprehensive spending Review (HM Treasury, 2010) government funding of the police in England and Wales was reduced by 20 per cent through to 2015. The scale of these cuts was unprecedented and has required police services to reconsider their priorities. At the same time the police have had to deal with major change in governance structures with the introduction of elected Police and Crime Commissioners in November 2012 – albeit following an election where only 15 per cent of the electorate turned up to vote (Rogers and Burn-Murdoch, 2012). The new policing landscape of fewer resources and (assumed) greater democratic accountability has generated a lot of uncertainty among serving police officers and questions over what form policing will take post-austerity. In this context the question of what the police are for becomes pertinent and is the focus for this chapter

Guerrilla gardening as normalised law-breaking::Challenges to land ownership and aesthetic order

This article considers guerrilla gardening that involves taking on other people’s land for gardening, usually without their permission. It is a practice that is overlooked largely by criminology, yet it can tell us something about attitudes to law and land ownership and challenges the approved aesthetic order of where we live. It can soften the look and feel of the city, leading to a different emotional and affective interaction with urbanity. Evidence is presented from a qualitative study of guerrilla gardeners from the North West of England. The discussion is informed theoretically by work on aesthetic criminology, do-it-yourself and temporary urbanism and the idea of urban commons. In this study, guerrilla gardening is found to be a normalised form of law-breaking that, despite not necessarily being to everyone’s taste and the gardeners having an autocratic view of property, is a form of urban intervention that is broadly accepted and welcomed, even by those who enforce the law

The case for a narrower focus to policing

In October 2014, the Second International Conference on Law Enforcement and Public Health took place at the Free University, Amsterdam. A particular highlight was a plenary debate between Professor Andrew Millie of the UK’s Edge Hill University, and the AIPM’s Dr Victoria Herrington on how wide should the police’s remit be. The genesis of this debate was a chapter published by Professor Millie in Jennifer Brown’s influential book on the Future of Policing (published in 2014), which itself informed Lord Stevens’ independent review on the future of policing in England and Wales (2013). This chapter developed ideas that Millie had put forward in a special edition of the scholarly journal Criminology and Criminal Justice in 2013 and set out the potential opportunities for policing to recast its role in society as a result of contraction enforced through austerity, and with it to reconsider the sense in police being involved in a range of non-crime issues. There is of course a counter argument to be made, particularly within the context of public health, which was the focus of the conference for which this debate was prepared. Dr Herrington assumes this counter position here and as such this Research Focus sets out both arguments and invites you to draw your own conclusions. In line with the AIPM tradition of advancing provocative ideas, we hope you will see this document as the starting point for further discussion, rather than an end point in and of itself

The aesthetics of anti-social behaviour

From the late 1990s onwards, anti-social behaviour has been high on the political agenda in Britain. Of course, at the end of the twentieth century, anti-social behaviour was nothing new, a fact highlighted in other contributions to this volume. Yet, following pressure on MPs from constituents facing difficulties with people labelled as ‘neighbours from hell’ (Straw, 1996; Field, 2003) — and influenced by American zero-tolerance policing strategies (Millie, 2009b) — the 1997–2010 New Labour government made anti-social behaviour one of its key policy targets. Being anti-social was defined by New Labour as behaving ‘in a manner that caused or was likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more persons not of the same household as [the perpetrator]’ (Crime and Disorder Act 1998: s. 1(1 a)). As has been well documented (Ashworth et al, 1998; Ramsay, 2004; Millie, 2009b), there were issues with such a vague definition. In the first instance, what causes me harassment, alarm or distress may be quite different for someone else. Deciding what or who ‘was likely’ to be anti-social was even more subjective and problematic