Developing and Maintaining Police-Researcher Partnerships to Facilitate Research Use - A Comparative Analysis

This Brief discusses methods to develop and maintain police - researcher partnerships.  First, the authors provide information that will be useful to police managers and researchers who are interested in creating and maintaining partnerships to conduct research, work together to improve policing and help others understand the linkages between the two groups.  Then, more specifically, they describe how police managers consider and utilize research in policing and criminal justice and its findings from a management perspective in both the United States and Australia.  While both countries experience similar issues of trust, acceptance, utility, and accountability between researchers and practitioners, the experiences in the countries differ.  In the United States with 17,000 agencies, the use of research findings by police agencies requires understanding, diffusion and acceptance.  In Australia with a small number of larger agencies, the problems of research-practitioner partnerships have different translational issues, including acceptance and application.  As long as police practitioners and academic researchers hold distinct and different impressions of each other, the likelihood of positive, cooperative, and sustainable agreements between them will suffer.

Peter Martin is the Assistant Commissioner responsible for Operations Support Command of the Queensland Police Service, Australia. He has in excess of 30 years policing experience in a broad range of policing roles. His current responsibilities are whole-of-state with respect to specialist and technical support in a police organization of over 15,000 members and a state population of approx. 4.5M. He is a graduate of the leadership in Counter-Terrorism Program. He was inducted into the Evidence-Based Policing Hall of Fame at the George Mason University in 2010. Peter was awarded the Australian Police Medal in the Australia Day Honors List in 2008 for his service to policing and the community. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Justice Studies (Griffith University) and an Executive Masters in Public Administration (Australian & New Zealand School of Government and Griffith University). Peter is also finalizing a PhD in the area of the police capability to reduce crime, violence and anti-social behavior in and around licensed premises (Queensland University of Technology).