Police Liaison Officers at Football: Challenging Orthodoxy through Communication and Engagement

This article expands upon research on the use of Police Liaison Teams (PLTs) within public order policing operations surrounding football fixtures. Using a Participant Action Research approach, the article reports on PLT use across multiple events and locations with different police forces, different personnel and fans and divergent command perspectives, as well as comparative data from PLT and non-PLT events. It identifies how accountability dynamics associated with the classification and management of risk in the policing of football may explain the continued reliance on more coercive policing tactics, as well as a number of other barriers that hinder the development of PLT use at football. Despite this, the article provides evidence that PLTs can offer similar benefits to the policing of football as they do to the policing of protest. In particular, we argue that developing such approaches will make the policing of football more human-rights complaint.