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This chapter considers the process of becoming a Police Community Support Officer (PCSO), from deciding to apply for the position to the initial training experiences and the first few months of shadowing experienced colleagues on foot patrol. The focus of this chapter is on the relationship between the individual PCSOs and the police institution. It considers the stages of initiation into community policing which PCSOs experienced and how the organization failed to fully equip these new recruits with the ‘tools’ needed. While work as a PCSO initially was attractive to these individuals, the reality upon entering the occupation was that many were left to learn for themselves how to do the work. The organization did not give consistent messages in this regard or adequate support in order for them to learn in a formal capacity how to do the job: this process will be called ‘institutional undermining’.

This penultimate chapter of the book brings together the research described so far and analyses its significance for an understanding of the occupational culture of Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) within the pluralized field of public policing. The two phenomena of institutional undermining and complementary/competitive teams discussed previously in the book are combined through a theoretical framework developed by Chan (1997) to analyse police officer and PCSO culture. This highlights the processes of developing and enacting an occupational culture through storytelling, and it highlights its artefacts (two distinct aspects of occupational culture which are often conflated). Both PCSOs and police officers experience these processes and generate cultural artefacts. The chapter explores how these processes and artefacts for the two groups, while at times appearing similar, have significant differences, which reveals a unique PCSO occupational culture.

Chapter 7 examines changes in neighbourhood and community policing since the research was conducted, the impact of this on Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs), and how the findings of this research have implications beyond England and Wales. Community policing specifically and pluralized policing more broadly are topics that have expression in a number of countries and contexts. It is important to recognize that while they are indeed separate arenas of research and practice, community policing is itself a pluralized method of policing in relation to its variability internationally and because it involves multiple actors. There is thus an unavoidable degree of overlap between the two concepts. This final chapter will therefore consider what this study of PCSOs can offer for current scholarship and discourse on both community and pluralized policing beyond the UK, and the necessity of considering occupational culture within these, using the framework developed in the previous chapters.

Chapter 3 presents a detailed account of what Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) do in their daily work, and the skills seen as essential in these tasks. It begins with a discussion of a ‘typical’ day for a PCSO in terms of its overall structure. It then considers the types of activities in which PCSOs engaged during the research, such as crime control or enforcement-related tasks, community engagement tasks, administrative tasks, and finally emergency-related work. The chapter then moves to the skills which were the most important for PCSOs to master: communication and the development of local knowledge. These analyses identify the ideal PCSO ‘performance’ which PCSOs will learn upon joining the organization and present and defend to their police officer colleagues and to the community members with whom they interact. This discussion utilizes observations and interviews from the staff and officers of the six neighbourhood teams who participated in this study.

Chapter 1 examines exiting research on policing pluralization, community policing, and police culture. Early studies of police occupational culture found that community policing and other types of ‘soft’ policing methods (such as partnership work) were not highly valued within the organization. However, this method was to revolutionize policing in the twenty-first century. In addition, ever more aspects of ‘police’ work are now undertaken by other actors in both the public and the private sectors. Consequently, what was once an insular and guarded organization is now more open to collaboration with outsiders, and it seems to appreciate better the ‘soft’ side of policing. However, as Police Community Support Officers are employees of police forces with a police-like mandate, these staff have been seen to present a greater danger to job security and the ‘purity’ of the police officer’s role.

This chapter examines the research project on which this book is based and the theoretical framework used in the analysis. As this was an observational study of Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs), it is important to have a detailed understanding of the immediate context in which the work was conducted, which this chapter explains. Observational studies of the police are not new, with some of the most influential policing research to date coming from ethnographies like this one. This is, however, the first ethnography of PCSOs. The chapter begins with an overview of the methods which were employed in the study. Next, the six neighbourhood policing teams which were observed will be described in detail to provide the context to the research. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of Erving Goffman’s ‘dramaturgy’, which provided a key theoretical framework for this analysis.

Chapter 5 describes and analyses the day-to-day encounters between Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) and police officer colleagues. These encounters are important to consider in order to understand fully PCSOs’ occupational experiences. The pluralized public police in England and Wales are often described as a police ‘family’. However, just how functional and harmonious a family this is is shown to be variable between and within police forces. The chapter considers the reasons for this from within a dramaturgical framework, to appreciate fully the nature and organization of these face-to-face interactions. In particular, Goffman’s concepts of performances, teamwork, and regions will be used. The chapter argues that police officers and PCSOs operate as separate performance teams, rather than as one unified one, and that the relationships between these teams varies. In some areas, the teams worked in a complementary way, whereas in others, the relationship was competitive.