Many volunteer police programmes around the world are struggling to maintain sustainable numbers, with the combined challenges of reduced patterns of voluntarism, unfavourable attitudes towards police volunteers, volunteer models with too narrow an appeal and inaccessiblity and increasingly negative public perceptions of policing.

This paper examines these challenges, and shows how the policing can adapt through redefining the role, capability, professional identities and operating models for the volunteer police officer in a fast-changing, and ever more complex, dangerous and contested policing environment.