‘Citizens in Policing’: Exploring the Role and Impact of Volunteering in Law Enforcement

Abstract

Citizens are involved directly in policing through volunteering in many different countries. Whereas some dimensions of police-community engagement can appear ‘necessarily ephemeral and shallow’ (Innes et al., 2015, p. 148), models of participative policing in which volunteers from the community engage directly in policing delivery, often through enduring and integrated relationships of co-production, represent a distinct and potentially transformational resetting of the community-police relationship. There is a growing interest in police voluntarism, resonating with key pillars of police reform including the importance of public engagement, trust and legitimacy in policing, the shifting nature of policing challenges, austerity, concepts of the wider ‘police family’ and growing prominence of organizational development and workforce reform (Bullock, 2014; Britton and Callender, 2018). Alongside this resurgence of interest, volunteers in policing also have a long and proud history in many national settings (Leon, 1991). This renewed interest reflects in significant innovation across models of police volunteering in many different countries. Despite this resurgence in voluntarism in policing, police volunteers have tended to have a limited engagement both across debates on police reform and within the emergence of evidence-based policing.