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Abstract
Police community support officers (PCSOs) have become an integral part of neighbourhood policing teams (NPTs) in England and Wales since the national roll-out of neighbourhood policing in 2008. Most research on PCSOs examines their outward-facing role, such as in the extent to which these police staff have become community engagement or enforcement-orientated. While this is important to consider, what is also important is the manner in which PCSOs have been accepted by the police organisation internally. This can have a bearing on the degree to which PCSOs are able to fulfil their roles in neighbourhood policing. The research reported here is based on a six-month observational study of PCSOs in England. Using Goffman's dramaturgical framework and concept of performance teams, this article argues that PCSOs and police constables (PCs) comprise separate performance teams within each NPT group, although the degree of separation between PC and PCSO teams varied from one NPT to another. One element of this relationship which was generally consistent was that police officers and supervisors tended to value more highly PCSO work which was enforcement-orientated. This challenges PCSOs to enhance this side of their performances in spite of their limited statutory powers. Some PCSOs experienced this as a daily pressure to justify their existence to police colleagues, leaving them as disillusioned and unsatisfied staff. This was clearly expressed in the use of space in these police stations in that PCSOs sought out spaces where they could relax in their own exclusive ‘back stage’ areas, away from police colleagues.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Prof Greg Smith, Dr Jonathan Mendel and Dr Karen Bullock for reviewing previous drafts of this article, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. I would also like to thank the PCSOs and police officers who agreed to participate in the research project on which this article is based.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. As with any member of the public, PCSOs have the citizen’s power of arrest and the use of reasonable force as stipulated by Sections 2 and 3 of the Criminal Law Act 1967. However, in the course of the research to be discussed here, it was found that supervisors discouraged PCSOs from using these powers as it would unduly confuse the boundaries between them and PCs, for both themselves and members of the public.
2. As with the participant’s names, all place names are also pseudonyms to protect anonymity.
3. As mentioned in the introduction, however, the exact impact on service delivery from the different performance teams of PCSOs was not directly assessed in this study. This would be a welcome area for future research.