Police auxiliaries in Australia: police liaison officers and the dilemmas of being part of the police extended family

Abstract

Studies on security governance have highlighted that internationally there has been the pluralisation of police roles and functions. One feature of these developments has been the emergence of dedicated quasi-police personnel, termed police auxiliaries. Public police agencies have been instrumental in supporting the growth of police auxiliaries, promoting their adoption as part of broader police reforms to improve the engagement of ethnic minority groups. One example of these trends in Australia has been the emergence of police liaison officers (PLOs). This paper draws upon research into a PLO programme in the Australian State of Queensland in order to explore the intra-organisational features of auxiliarisation. Data from qualitative interviews are analysed to highlight that while police auxiliaries do make an important contribution to improving police community engagement, they face their own dilemmas and challenges that occur from being part of the police extended family. One relates to role conflict arising from a conflicting sense of accountability to the police and the wider community. This is particularly pronounced for police auxiliaries who are of an ethnic/racial background.

Keywords:

• police liaison officers
• plural policing
• auxiliarisation
• Australia

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Queensland Police Service for supporting this project and are indebted to the Queensland Police Service Cultural Advisory Unit. We would also like to thank the Police Liaison Officers who gave up their time to be interviewed. The opinions in this report are those of the authors and do not reflect Queensland Police policy.

Notes

1. See the Australian and New Zealand Policing Advisory Agency at http://www.anzpaa.org.au/

2. Unlike PCSOs in the UK whom have limited powers as stipulated under the Police Reform Act 2002.

3. This is not a dissimilar requirement made of all officers of the QPS, and can be the result of the number of calls for service received on any one day or decisions relating to the deployment of uniform staff and PLOs.

4. For more information on Leximancer see http://www.leximancer.thecustomerinsightportal.com/. Given Leximancer employs the same method of coding across text sources it has high levels of reliability and stability in the results it produces, compared to manual coding procedures which confront the problem of inter-coder reliability Smith and Humphreys 2006.

5. Murri is an aboriginal term used to describe particular Indigenous clans from Queensland.

6. The Police Powers and Responsibility Act 2000 is the central piece of legislation governing police powers in Queensland.

7. The interviewee is referring to preventing paint sniffing, with volatile substance misuse (i.e. sniffing or chroming) a significant problem among Indigenous youth (Gray et al. 2006).