Building Bridges between Police Researchers and Practitioners: Agents of Change in a Complex World

The proposed project will use a mixed methods research strategy to present a broad and comprehensive investigation into police-researcher partnerships. The general objective of the project is to investigate evaluations or initiatives with an added focus on the overall nature of these relationships. The expected outcome is to create and suggest appropriate methods and techniques that will improve and advance these collaborations into future comprehensive partnerships. The research design will include lessons learned from past and current police practitioner-researcher partners who have worked together or attempted to work together, in order to answer the following research questions: First, what are the barriers and facilitators to developing effective partnerships? Second, what are the factors that inhibit or support the establishment of sustainable partnerships? The examination of these questions will unfold in a multi-stage process. The first stage will involve a brief survey of a nationally representative sample of state and local law enforcement chief officers. The intent of the survey is to identify a population of agencies that have engaged in collaborations with members of the research community. This population will be used to develop a sample of agencies who have been involved in research collaborations (past and current) in order to capture their perspective in relation to the stated research questions. The sample drawn from this population will capture leaders from different size agencies, and include collaborations, partnerships, and partners who were supported through government funds or some other means. The intent of this strategy is to capture the nature of police-researcher collaborations and partnerships in a variety of settings and with a variety of outcomes, including successful ones and not-so-successful ones. The second stage will include interviews with a sample of police researchers who have been involved in collaborations in order to gain their perspectives on these relationships. The third and final stage will incorporate case studies of four police-researcher collaborations that were deemed successful by the participants to provide in-depth insight into the characteristics of successful partnerships that can serve as models for future such efforts. ca/ncf