Abstract
This article explores senior and strategic perspectives on the volunteer Special Constabulary in England and Wales, based on 38 interviews with senior police leaders. The strategic context and leadership of Special Constabularies represents an overlooked element of police leadership, given the scale and potential of volunteer officers to impact upon policing delivery and reform. The paper identifies tension between a traditional strategic paradigm that frames bounded expectations of the role of Special Constables, emphasising differences between them and their paid counterparts, and considerations of police reform which prompt different thinking in respect of practice, identity and integration of volunteer officers.
Highlights
The strategic leadership of the Special Constabulary in police forces represents an important but largely overlooked element of police leadership
Senior leaders tended to cast the current period as being an ‘important moment’ in time for the Special Constabulary
2018) and while this study of senior leaders in four police forces provides insight, and foregrounds themes and issues for future research and policy consideration, it should not be seen as representative of all forces or to be generalisable to all other force senior regular officer leadership teams
Summary
The strategic leadership of the Special Constabulary in police forces represents an important but largely overlooked element of police leadership. Where there is a strategic attention upon the Special Constabulary these are primarily to be found in peripheral, niched strategic documents, such as national strategies for the Special Constabulary or for ‘Citizens in Policing’ (cf NPCC, 2018), rather than within broader, generalist strategic documents on the future of policing. This strategic picture suggests an unfulfilled strategic potential (Britton and Callender, 2018; Britton and Knight, 2016), summed up by Caless (2018: 25) who talks of:
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