NIJ's locally initiated research partnerships in policing: Factors that add up to success

Abstract

Institute's policy-relevant research results and initiatives. The Attorney General has determined that publication of this periodical is necessary in the transaction of the public business required by law of the Department of Justice.

Developing and Maintaining Police-Researcher Partnerships to Facilitate Research Use

“…One of the classic pieces of policing research, the Kansas City Preventative Patrol Experiment, conducted in the early 1970s, was a practitioner-researcher partnership that was generated by questions inside the agency regarding patrol deployment (Kelling et al 1974). While additional examples of researchers working with agencies would follow, these relationships often represented the researcher getting the cooperation of an agency to conduct a study that pursued questions of interest to the research community (McEwen 1999). These relationships were quite limited and did not reflect the knowledge exchange strategy.…”

The utilization of research by the police☆

“…Other police chiefs have similarly acknowledged the value of action research partnerships in assisting departments with the development of effective crime reduction strategies and tactics (Beal & Kerlikowski, 2010;Engel & Whalen, 2010). Funded research on partnerships has also identified and highlighted a variety of success stories (McEwen, 1999).…”

Research and Policing: The Infrastructure and Political Economy of Federal Funding

“…That infrastructure might, in theory, have returned even more research engagement and results. Instead, the LIRP produced neither research publications nor substantial engagement of professional leaders in research (McEwen 1999). The most likely explanation for the difference in results was the difference in infrastructure and the corollary limitations on the political economy.…”

“…1 A different view of the LIRP is that it was more like the USDA extension-agent model than like a teaching-hospital model. McEwen (1999) reports that the tasks performed under these grants ranged widely, from designing databases for record keeping to installing mapping programs. These face-to-face "technology transfers" from researchers to police practitioners seem very similar to the strategy for communicating agricultural research to farm operators and perhaps should be evaluated in relation to that objective.…”