Book review: Megan O’Neill, Police Community Support Officers: Cultures and Identities within Pluralised Policing
| Author | Merlijn van Hulst |
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1362480620906696 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480620906696
Theoretical Criminology
2021, Vol. 25(1) 169 –183
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480620906696
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Book reviews
Megan O’Neill, Police Community Support Officers: Cultures and Identities within Pluralised Policing,
Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2019; 192 pp.: 9780198803676, £70.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Merlijn van Hulst, Tilburg University, Netherlands
Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) are salaried members of the police staff
without the warranted power to arrest. They were introduced in the Police Reform Act
(2002) as a new part of the British police force with the aim to enhance the visibility of
the police and strengthen neighborhood policing teams (NPTs). Megan O’Neill has stud-
ied PCSOs, as a relatively new mode of police, ethnographically and reports on various
aspects of these officers’ work and, moreover, their position within the police. Police
Community Support Officers is a well-written and rich text of concern to policing schol-
ars and any person who is interested in police cultures generally.
In Part I, the first two chapters, O’Neill introduces the context of her research. She
first discusses the widening of the ‘police family’, with other actors from the public and
private sector becoming more involved in various aspects of policing. Then, she sketches
how community policing developed and NPTs came to the scene. Finally, she briefly
discusses various themes that have been central to police culture debates over the last
decades, such as bonding, storytelling, gender and the action orientation that comes with
the job. In Chapter 2, O’Neill introduces her approach. In order to capture and under-
stand their occupational experiences, O’Neill shadowed PCSOs across six teams in two
forces (resulting in approximately 350 hours of observations). She also interviewed these
officers and a selection of their colleagues. This kind of ethnographic research has been,
and continues to be, the hallmark of research on police culture, for ‘its ability to expose
and situate the inner-life of policing in its various guises and settings’ (Bacon et al., 2020:
3). In Part II we find the key empirical chapters. First, we learn what PCSOs do. As we
might expect, this varies. There is role ambiguity, there are differences in expectations of
what PCSOs do across forces and teams, and there are differences in the interpretation of
the role among PCSOs themselves. Tensions derive from PCSOs’ presence on the streets
in combination with their rather limited discretion. Next, we learn about becoming a
PCSO. We again encounter variation. This time, there is disparity across teams, but also
through time, as training schemes have been altered since the role was created in 2002.
The view among many of the PCSOs is that their training was ‘either inadequate,
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