In need of Support

With the Security Industry Authority going great guns in its well-reasoned bid to regulate the private sector, the headlines greeting readers of London's Metro newspaper on 17 September couldn't have been more dispiriting for those of us involved in professionalising the fight against crime.

'Civilian police in crime probe' stated Metro journalist Kath Freer. According to Freer's Special Report – and a similar expose in the previous weekend's Sunday Telegraph – "dozens" of civilian officers recruited by the police service to help tackle minor crime and disorder are now under investigation for drugs and fraud-related offences.

Accusations of that nature concerning Home Secretary David Blunkett's much-publicised Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) are by no means music to the industry's collective ears. More than 20,000 PCSOs have already been recruited to boost the police effort in cracking down on littering, graffiti and noisy neighbours (to name but some of their tasks). If, as the report suggests, one-in-20 of the Metropolitan Police's PCSOs are under investigation, for example, then that's a wholly unacceptable number.

Among the crimes alleged to have been committed are drug dealing, assault and accusations of racism.

Sunday Telegraph reporters David Bamber and Ken Hyder suggest that, thus far in London – where allegations have been made against 34 officers – three PCSOs have resigned, one has been deported, a further three suspended and 11 given official warnings.

   To its great credit, the Public and Commercial Services Union representing the PCSOs has immediately highlighted the way to combat this unseemly mess. Part of the difficulty must surely lie with a lack of bespoke training for police officers, many of whom have never had to supervise such 'civilian members of staff'. It's highly likely that many of the investigations facing PCSOs are due to police officers wrongly applying their own disciplinary procedures to a workforce answerable to a wholly different set of regulations.

Clearly, the police must respond to these problems by re-assessing recruitment procedures and the training regimen for PCSOs. Regular police officers have to attend instructional school for six months, but PCSOs can receive tuition for as little as three weeks. That's plainly short of the mark.