Vulnerability and Policing: The Views of Service Providers and Users

Vulnerability has become a prominent focus of social policy interventions with police now playing a leading role in street-level governance of the concept through multi-agency working. Yet, we still know little about how vulnerability is operationalised and experienced on the ground. This article employs Q methodology to explore the views of frontline service providers and users on how vulnerability is mobilised in policing settings. We identify three distinct viewpoints and areas of cross-viewpoint consensus that together reveal a tension between the conceptual promise of vulnerability and the realities of its operationalisation. We conceptualise this dynamic through the lens of boundary objects, showing how vulnerability simultaneously enables coordination and reproduces power asymmetries, highlighting its transformative but contested potential.