Two decades since PCSOs joined crime fight

This week, Police Community Support Officers(PCSOs) have been in existence for 20 years.

My good friend and colleague, David Blunkett, was the Home Secretary at the time. I can truthfully say that I have almost never found a community that did not rate their PCSO highly. The PCSO has often been the only stable police officer in many communities and valued accordingly.

PCSOs wear police uniforms, but they are police staff, not warranted officers. They form about 6.8 per cent of all police employees with about one quarter of all PCSOs in the Met.

They were not immediately accepted by everyone. Some police officers thought it was a way of having more bodies on the ground without paying for trained, warranted officers. But they soon proved their worth and within seven years they had reached the peak of their numbers at 16,814.

Then austerity and the cuts came. Unlike warranted officers, however, they could be made redundant, and some were in order to save money and balance the books during the dark years of austerity.

In South Yorkshire, their numbers were reduced though the money saved was used to bolster warranted officer numbers.

PCSOs are part of a neighbourhood team (called at one time Safer Neighbourhood Teams). Over the years they have performed a range of duties: high visibility patrols; tackling anti-social behaviour; crowd control; directing traffic at public events; getting evidence; supporting front-line officers.

One of their most important functions has been engagements with communities. This was especially important during the austerity years when neighbourhood teams were subsumed into response teams (to save money) and the PCSO remained the only regular face of the force in communities.

Now the neighbourhood teams are being rebuilt and PCSOs take their place in them.

I am sometimes asked why PCSOs are not given powers of arrest. But the consequence of doing this would be that every time they made an arrest, they would have to leave the neighbourhood and go off to a custody suite to process those arrested.

The whole point of the PCSO is that they are rooted in their neighbourhood.

In recent years, some PCSOs have chosen to become warranted officers. But next year more will be needed in South Yorkshire and a recruitment drive will begin.

We thank the PCSOs for the last twenty years. We wonder what will be asked of this most resilient part of the force in the next twenty years as the world around us changes.