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Hope, M, Radburn, M and Stott, CJT (2023) Police discretion and the role of the ‘spotter’ within football crowd policing: risk assessment, engagement, legitimacy and de-escalation. Policing and Society: an international journal of research and policy. ISSN 1043-9463
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Abstract
Discretion is a key feature of policing, yet its surrounding research has historically been heavily reliant upon exploring interpersonal or dyadic encounters between individual officers and members of the public. More recently, studies have explored how discretionary decisions by police officers impact upon and interact with group-level and organisational processes but few studies have explored the relevance of discretion to debates in the literature on public order policing. Correspondingly, there is to date only a limited body of research exploring the nature and dynamics of dialogue-based football-related public order policing. This study addresses these combined gaps by drawing upon data from interviews with specialist football officers, referred to as ‘spotters’ or Dedicated Football Officers, from five English police forces. Our analysis critiques the idea that these specialist roles revolve merely around the surveillance, categorisation and enforcement of fans who are considered to pose a risk to public order. We highlight how these officers understand their roles in terms of the use of discretion. We argue that in a complex intergroup environment officers utilise discretion to manage perceptions of their legitimacy among supporters. This ‘social capital’ in turn enhances their capacity to de-escalate and avoid disorder through the promotion of self-regulatory behaviour. We discuss the relevance of our study for theoretical approaches to understanding discretion and consider the implications of our analysis for developing a more formal dialogue-focused and discretion-based approach to football crowd policing in and beyond England and Wales.
Item Type: | Article |
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Additional Information: | © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. |
Uncontrolled Keywords: | Dialogue; football spotter; public order; discretion |
Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology > BF636 Applied psychology B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare H Social Sciences > HX Socialism. Communism. Anarchism |
Divisions: | Faculty of Natural Sciences > School of Psychology |
Depositing User: | Symplectic |
Date Deposited: | 01 Feb 2023 08:20 |
Last Modified: | 14 Apr 2023 10:45 |
URI: | https://eprints.keele.ac.uk/id/eprint/11872 |