This paper presents a ‘third order reflection’ on the practices and limitations of police research in a case study of the moral economy of a police gun-crime panic. It approaches the questions ‘what is police research good for?’ and ‘what matters in policing?’ through a critique of police-oriented, evidence-based police (EBP) research. The paper suggests that partnerships between police and academics are structured by performance metrics and the rhetoric of New Public Management. Both academics and police are enveloped in the ‘politics of numbers’ and thereby struggle to overcome a narrow outlook. Ironically, evidence-based policing research produces evidence of a different kind, having to do with police practices that reveal the assumptive world of the police métier and thereby help to generate the foundations of third order reflection and critique. Describing a gun-crime panic in a specific time and place, and relating it to the broader moral economy of policing governance of which it is a part, is a practical demonstration of how to take EBP police research far beyond its limitations to the more fertile grounds of third order reflection.

The relationship between police practitioners and researchers has been described as a ‘dialogue of the deaf’ (MacDonald in Bradley, 2005), a ‘dialogue of the listening’ (Johnston & Shearing, 2009) or a ‘dialogue of the hard-of-hearing’ (Bronitt, 2013). Relying on their experiences into research on, for, by and with the police in the last decade, Easton & De Vlieger recount their Belgian reflections on these dialogues. Their experiences in the research related to these partnerships are described and the key barriers and essential enablers for nurturing these partnerships discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to add to the growing body of literature on police-academic partnerships, which has emerged over the last thirty years. Using a multi-force and multi-site study of ‘good’ police custody practices, as a case study, we examine the cultures of police-academic partnerships through the concepts of “ways of acting” and “ways of knowing” (Canter, 2004). In terms of ways of acting, we examine differences that arose whilst forming police-academic relationships and accessing multiple forces and custody facilities. In terms of ways of knowing, we examine differences in academic and police theorization about police-citizen relationships. It is argued that different ways of acting – rooted in the cultural, but also organisational and structural contexts of policing and academia – created challenges for the research and for police-academic relationships. By contrast, different ways of knowing contributed to helpful synergies between the two authors, helping the police author to see his work anew and aiding the academic author with the theorization process. One of the key lessons from this case study is that theory development should be seen as foundational to, and as strengthening of, police-academic partnerships.

Recent literature on police partnership working has challenged the orthodoxy established during the 1980s and 1990s that this is an unpopular area of police activity. Instead, recent research suggests that partnership working can reinforce and enhance the policing value of pragmatism (O’Neill and McCarthy, 2014), due to its focused and bottom-up approach to problem solving. Using a casestudy approach to investigate a co-located partnership group tasked with reducing demands for policing services, I explore the precise nature of the processes that enable these apparently effective elements of partnership working to emerge. I suggest a core role for “authority work” defined as the process through which particular interpretations of people, events and outcomes are warranted and rendered legitimate. I use the insights generated from the analysis to reflect on why partnership working may sometimes succeed in both producing successful multi-agency collaboration and what such success might mean for those individuals that are the targets of partnership interventions.

Police forces are long established organizations shot through with tradition and confident of their underlying organizational identity. This means that when police practitioners collaborate with academics, they tend to be more concerned with pragmatic questions of ‘what works?’ than they are with existential questions of ‘who am I?’. However, on the fringes of the ‘extended policing family’, where organizational identities are far more fluid, a different picture emerges. These less established organizations are often equally interested in both types of question. This presents an opportunity for academics and practitioners to work together on deeper questions regarding the constitution of the policing landscape. Through the lens of Hatch and Schultz’s (2002) model of organizational identity dynamics, this article profiles one such example which revolves around a research collaboration between the Security Industry Authority – the public body tasked with regulating the UK private security industry – and the University of Sheffield.

The push for police to do more with less resources requires police practices to be effective, efficient and evidence-based. There exists an imperative to use and produce the best research evidence available to solve policing problems, however there often exists impediments to effectively work with police on policing. This article explores ideas and key ingredients for facilitating productive partnerships between academic and police organisations. The Queensland Police Service (QPS) has crafted a productive framework for co-producing research with Queensland universities. Using the QPS as a case study, we unravel events and ingredients leading to the growth of evidence-based research consumption and production. Our article provides background on a landmark trial – the Queensland Community Engagement Trial (QCET) and extends that procedural justice was not only the key theoretical foundation for the trial but also the catalyst and facilitator for effective co-production of research and evidence-based practice.

This paper considers the effect of organizational context, alongside wider political factors, on the ability of police/academic partnerships to ‘deliver’ experimental studies in policing. Comparing and contrasting across two recent studies, the Making and Breaking Barriers research project on mounted police, and the Scottish Community Engagement Trial (ScotCET), the paper draws on the experience of the authors and their police partners in designing, implementing and interpreting the research, with a particular focus on relational factors and how these shaped the research process. The mechanics of designing and delivering a policing experiment cannot work without attending to the nature of police/researcher partnership, the challenges posed by police cultures and other organizational factors, and the environment within which the study is occurring. There is a strong need for academic/police partnerships to consider experimental research projects within their wider social, economic and political contexts.

This paper examines the interplay between research and police reform. Focussing on the creation of Scotland’s national police force in 2013 it examines the role of research as ‘expert knowledge’ in the political and policy debate leading up to the reform and the on-going evaluation of the impacts and implications of the new police force. The paper also situates the relationship between research and reform in the context of the role played by the Scottish Institute for Policing Research, a strategic collaboration between Scotland’s universities, Police Scotland and the Scottish Police Authority. The analysis is informed at a conceptual level by the work of Boswell and her consideration of the different ways in which bureaucratic organisations make use of expert knowledge. This focuses attention on both instrumental uses (ensuring decisions are based on sound reasoning and empirical understanding) and symbolic uses where knowledge plays a role in enhancing legitimacy or helping substantiate policy preferences in areas of political contestation. These different uses of expert knowledge have important implications for thinking about the role of police-academic partnerships.