‘The ones in red:’ people who use drugs’ experiences of the Janus-faced nature of police volunteerism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Championed as an economic strategy to enhance community safety and reduce the need for formal police response to social disorder, volunteer policing groups have become a common sight in many urban centres. They represent a key element of police civilianisation, with existing research unmasking how they differ from other civilian personnel and their relationship with sworn police officers. Far less, however, is known about how marginalised groups, such as People Experiencing Houselessness (PEH) and People Who Use Drugs (PWUD), experience and perceive police volunteers. Drawing upon 50 semi-structured interviews with unhoused PWUD in Lethbridge, Alberta (Canada), we interrogate how participants experienced, perceived, and engaged with an unpaid police volunteer group responsible for addressing downtown community safety – the Lethbridge Police Service’s Ambassador Watch Programme (The Watch). Our findings show participants held diverse and often conflicting perceptions of this group, with The Watch serving as 1) caring agents, 2) agents of surveillance and control, and 3) a medium for police intervention. We argue that despite some of the benefits provided by police volunteer groups, they may exacerbate harm and feelings of insecurity for marginalised people when organised and managed by police agencies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".