Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation

THE POLICE REFORM PROGRAMME
“The success of PCSOs and the many
valuable roles undertaken by police
staff show the crucial part they will
play in the future of policing.”
officers and are more interested in the
standard of service they receive than the
status of the staff member providing it.
One remarkable development over the
past 10 years has been the introduction
of unsworn Police Community Support
Officers (PCSOs). While in some
sections of the media these colleagues
are still derided as ‘plastic police’, at the
local level there is huge support for our
PCSOs from those active in local areas.
They are a great example of how
police staff can bring a different range
of skills and attitudes, as well as the
practical benefits of having a group
of staff who want to concentrate on
building relations with local people and
being visible in their area and are not
looking to progress into other specialist
fields. Their positive impact deserves a
comprehensive study in itself.
Need for clarity
To set a clear strategy for police staff
in the future you first have to be clear
about the position of police officers as
professionals. The Association of Chief
Police Officers (ACPO) has argued that
the growing complexity of policing
requires greater levels of expertise
and specialism and therefore a greater
regard for professional development.
Flowing from this is the need for
clarity over which activities require
the skills, powers and experience of a
police officer and which are best done
by other colleagues, leaving officers to
concentrate on their core roles.
This positioning of the professional
within a more mixed workforce has been
developed in fields such as education
and nursing and has brought out a
more mixed workforce, but also the
opportunity of raising the status of
the teacher and nurse as professionals
with arguably increased status and
recognition from the public.
We have already seen police staff
swept up in the general movement to
national accredited standards and higher
degrees of specialism. This has always
existed in areas such as human resources
and finance, where there are existing
national professional bodies, but we
have also seen this applied to areas such
as crime scene investigators, analysts
and the national training programmes
for PCSOs.
In other areas such as those police
staff who work in control rooms and
call centres, civilian investigators and
administrative roles there is more
variation between forces, which has
caused the main trade union Unison
to call for a system of national job
evaluation.
In future we are likely to see a greater
mix in the workforce with officers, police
staff, volunteers and also staff employed
through collaborative arrangements
and increasingly through outsourcing.
Police staff will have an important role
in the College of Policing and this will
undoubtedly lead to more national
standards for training and accreditation.
With a softening of the previous
political obsession with police officer
numbers and the need for all forces
to show the most efficient workforce
mix, we will see a higher proportion
of police staff in the overall workforce
over the longer term. Unison and other
trade unions play an important part in
representing police staff, but we need a
voice for senior police staff and this may
be something the Police Superintendents’
Association may consider.
The success of PCSOs and the many
valuable roles undertaken by police staff
show the crucial part they will play in
the future of policing. This reflects the
growing complexity of policing and the
need for more specialist posts.
Police staff free up officers to
concentrate on activities which require
their particular expertise and powers.
More fundamentally, however, they
bring in greater diversity, experience
of working in other organisations and
different attitudes and approaches.
As is often said, policing is too
important to be left solely to the police.
POLICING UK | 53