VARIETY is the spice of life for Special Constables in the Wellington area.

That is the view of Special Inspector Chris Rees, 35, who has been a Special for ten years, mainly around Wellington.

“I think that’s why a lot of Specials do what they do – every shift is different,” he said.

The volunteer officers have the same powers as regular police officers – including the power to arrest – and on the Avon and Somerset force look identical, carrying the same kit and responding to the same type of incidents.

The Somerset West area has a team of about 60 Specials who cover Wellington, Williton, Taunton, Minehead and Bridgwater, and in Wellington are part of a team which also includes regular officers and Police Community Support Officers.

Chris said: “The job is very varied – on a day-to-day basis it might start with something as simple as dealing with a traffic offence – a driver not wearing a seatbelt or using a mobile phone.

“Then it might be a road traffic collision on a main road, and as the day goes on – and the dynamics change – it might be dealing with domestic incidents, burglaries or rural burglaries, and as the night progresses, suspicious behaviour.”

Chris said he had also been involved in a lot of missing person searches, sometimes with the Force helicopter, looking for people who were vulnerable or in distress.

Wellington police station covers a huge area, much of it rural, from Triscombe in the north, down to the Devon border and almost over to Bishopswood to the south.

Chris, who works 30 hours a month as a Special, can often be seen in Wellington on a push bike or marked police car.

He said: “Wellington is generally quite a low-crime community but it has the same issues as any other town.

“There will always be anti-social behaviour and, unfortunately, there will always be some drug use.”

In the time he has been a Special Chris has seen the nature of the incidents he deals with change.

“I used to work Friday and Saturday late shifts and we would always have issues with the King’s Arms when it closed.

“We don’t have that drunk and disorderly element we used to have. People seem to have changed their behaviour.”

Anti-social behaviour by youths has sometimes been an issue in Wellington but Chris feels it is a small minority who cause the problem.

“It is difficult in the town with the closure of the youth centre and things like that,” he said.

“There’s not much for young people to do. It’s finding a balance, in my opinion, between policing and allowing children to be children.

“Unfortunately it’s probably only one per cent in the town who cause most of the ‘noise’ and the rest are generally well behaved.”

Chris, who has a wife and two children, is a physicist by background and works as a risk engineer.He had thought about joining the police as a regular officer but his day job ‘took a different turn’.

He said: “I became a Special to give back to the community, to change things, to help people who needed help if they are in distress.”

He said skills he had learned in the police, including in leadership, had been useful in his career and vice-versa.

Specials have their own rank structure and as an inspector Chris is responsible for managing other officers – their development, reviews, training and welfare.

He said the Avon and Somerset force is trying to recruit Specials in the Wellington area – recruits need to commit to 16 hours a month of operational duties.

He said: “I recommend it because of the interaction you get with the public and the friends you make in the Constabulary.

“They are a very good team at Wellington – very supportive and very close knit.”

Training takes place at evenings and weekends over three or four months, as recruits have regular day jobs, at Police headquarters.

A two-year probation period follows in which recruits are tutored by a regular officer. Recruits are not allowed out on their own until they have completed their probation.

The Special’s role can sometimes have its funny side. Chris recalls being shouted at by a member of the public trying to gather a loose horse in Monument Road, a task, he says, that is not part of police standard training.

He also remembers being called out to what was reported as ‘a large public order fight’ at Wellington Park on a snowy day. “Someone viewing from a distance saw people falling over and others jumping on top of them,” he said. “It was people slipping on the ice – it was just a mass ‘fall-over’, there was no fight or anything like that!”