Citizen involvement in policing - a critical but under-researched aspect of policing

The forms that direct citizen involvement in policing take vary widely across different national contexts. What is more consistent internationally is the relative neglect the different formations of direct involvement in policing have experienced from policymakers, politicians, professionals and academics. Police volunteers play a significant part in policing in many communities, across many countries. In a large number of national settings, including England and Wales, Scotland, USA, Canada, the Republic of Ireland, Australia and the Netherlands a new significance is being attached to police volunteers and to wider elements of public participation in policing. There are social policy drivers in these national settings which are underpinning substantial increases in the scale of voluntarism and in the roles that volunteers perform. Increasingly, this expansion in voluntarism internationally is playing a significant part in police reform. In contrast, many other country’s policing systems do not have any direct mechanisms for police volunteering. Beyond police volunteering, there are also wide variations in the forms that public involvement takes across police accountability, crime prevention and problem-solving, police-youth engagement and community consultation. The paper will draw from three research projects. Firstly, it will present initial findings from the ‘Citizens in Policing’ research programme. The research programme is the largest of its kind ever conducted in the UK, empirically exploring a range of different manifestations of citizen involvement in policing. The research draws on in-depth interviews with serving and former Special Constables and Police Support Volunteers across England and Wales, also engaging with ‘Regular’ police officers to explore issues of cultural integration in respect of volunteers, and with senior police leaders to explore issues of strategic culture in respect of citizen involvement. Secondly, the paper will discuss the analysis of the findings from the national ‘Citizens in Policing’ survey undertaken in early 2016 in England and Wales. Finally, the paper introduces a new comparative research programme across police citizen involvement internationally. The paper explores the implications of different models of citizen involvement in policing, and in particular the apparent bifurcation internationally between policing systems increasing underpinned by direct citizen involvement, and those that are not. It situates developments in police citizen involvement within wider developments in citizen involvement, co-production, responsibilisation and ownership in public services, and discusses the social implications of a further growth in police voluntarism, plotting out several possible courses for the future development of citizen involvement in policing.