Volunteerism Within the Blue Wall: A Community-Centric Analysis of Volunteer Police Officers

Full-time police officers and law enforcement programs have come under analysis by the public and researchers alike, elucidating understandings that push for more equity and community involvement within law enforcement. In wider literature, however, there is a general lack of conversation and critical analyses surrounding volunteer police officers, their backgrounds, and perspectives on policing and community. As a program presupposed for community-oriented individuals to remedy current gaps between communities and legal institutions, it is important to see their understanding of their profession and their relationship to the communities they serve to see whether or not the initiative meets its transformative potential it posits for localities and departments. To better understand this, this research draws on eleven interviews from D.C. Metropolitan Police Department volunteer officers, ethnographic observation of the Volunteer Law Enforcement Officer Alliance Conference in the Cayman Islands, and collected online community documents produced by MPD in relation to the volunteer program. In the case of volunteer officers, I found that individual motivations, collectively homogeneous demographics, anti-community sentiments, and the inherent friction between departments and other legal institutions, all amidst the generally non-transformative structure and culture of the volunteer program, undermine VPOs’ ability to actualize the mission of helping communities. Thus, as a portion of the recent wave of community-minded approaches to policing, and as a case of political avoidance and the limitations of volunteering initiatives, this research hopes to deepen the understanding of volunteer police officers within the backdrop of mainstream conceptions of law enforcement and volunteerism in America.