Presenter: Ciara Aucoin Delloue, c.aucoin@ulster.ac.uk

Chair: Shane MacGiolabhui

Theory contends that police use of force during public order policing reflects frontline officers’ perceptions of the crowd’s size and political message and how these crowd-based features threaten police constructions of a sense of ‘order’. Yet we know little about how officers perceive threats and relatedly, their constructions of order. This paper examines police officers’ role conceptions during the policing of public order using Waddington’s theory of “in-the-job and on-the-job trouble” (1994). Specifically, it examines how frontline officers of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) perceive of trouble and their role in response in the case of large “contentious parades” in Northern Ireland in the period 2008-2020.

Ciara was a PhD researcher in the School of Applied Social and Policy Sciences at Ulster University from 2019-2023 as a  EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow. Her research was on the public order policing practices of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). She completed her PhD viva (external examiner Prof. Tim Newburn) in June 2023 and is currently completing her corrections before final submission. She currently works as a consultant on an international research project funded by the EU and the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent.