‘When is a Spotter not a Spotter? – What’s in a name…’

UKFPU (United Kingdom Football policing Unit) identify 4 key roles at Football: Police Commander / Football Liaison Officer / Football Intelligence Officer and Football Spotter. Here in the West Midlands however the distinction (with the exception of the Police Commander) is not so obvious.

So when is your clubs dedicated Football Officer a ‘Spotter’ or when is he ‘liaising’ and when is he gathering intelligence?

The answer is simply that he is all three!

You will know if you follow our twitter accounts regularly that each club in the West Midlands has their own dedicated ‘Football Officer’. They are our key liaison with the club, working with them to enhance safety and minimise the risk of crime and disorder at matches, and along with the Unit Inspector or Sgt they attend the Local Authority Safety Advisory Groups for the ground and are a source of specialist police advice.

As well as their ‘Football Liaison’ duties described above, your Football Officer is also the ‘Football Intelligence Officer’ - there to collect and forward on intelligence to help determine the match category and resource levels deployed at any game. Whilst the focus is often on minimising the impact of anti social behaviour or disorder, intelligence in reality is almost anything you can think of. For example how many coaches are expected to arrive or travel? How many tickets are the clubs likely to allocate to away fans? And importantly how well behaved fans have been and how few (if any) arrests were made at games. This is all collated in written ‘pre match assessments’ and verbally debriefed in our ‘weekly meeting’ to be forwarded to the Match Commander.

Then we finally get to match day and this is when your Football Officer also takes on the role of ‘Spotter’, supported by other ‘spotters’ drawn from the local area.

The UKFPU job description for a spotter is simple enough:

To provide a football policing operation with live and relevant information and intelligence on supporter groups (i.e. intelligence)
To act as a link between the Police Service and a clubs supporter community (i.e. liaison)

So a spotter must know the supporters, talk to them, know who travels together as a supporter club, or a family & friends group, how will they travel and how all of that may affect their behaviour e.g. will they arrive early or late, will they go into the town first or direct to the ground? And importantly – maintain that relationship with them.
All of this helps the spotter provide ‘live intelligence to the Commander’, but by default all that talking and sharing information with the supporters is back to the Football Liaison role…Confused !?
Sadly there are occasions where the ‘spotter’ does have to focus on a very small minority of people – but even here the above remains the same. It may surprise you to know that your Football Officer knows who is likely to engage in or seek out disorder and in the majority of those cases actually has a ‘relationship’ with them as above and will try to engage with them or intervene at every opportunity to avoid this.

Finally the confusion was made clear to us in our office last week when one of our Football Officers was mistaken for ‘spotting’ with his camera when in fact he was photographing road users to discuss pedestrian safety post match at a forthcoming Safety Advisory Group. For those that missed it here is the youtube link:

http://t.co/irUODnhQ

In future he will wear proper camouflage so as not to cause distress to the public…

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