Enhancing the Research Partnership between the Albany Police Department and the John Finn Institute for Public Safety

The Albany Police Department (APD) and the John Finn Institute seek to enhance their partnership, establishing an infrastructure that will institutionalize the use of research by APD. The initial research undertaking involves empirical research designed to increase the efficiency of proactive policing, increasing the ratio of successful or other high-value stops to all stops. Insofar as proactive policing can be conducted more efficiently, then it may be possible to side-step the trade-off between crime control and legitimacy.
The project provides for the placement of the researchers in APD. The partnership will be organized in terms of a steering committee the new Research Advisory Council (RAC) and a project working group. For this project, the partners will: (a) collect and analyze data on stops, levels of crime in the immediate vicinity of stops, and the risk factors for crime among the people who are stopped, with a view towards differentiating high-value and lower-value stops; (b) work with analysts to develop analytical protocols and products to provide regular feedback on the ratio of high- to lower-value for operational commanders; (c) assess the impact of such feedback on the pattern of stops; (d) identify and study officers who are especially successful in making high-value stops, to better understand the practices that make them successful; (e) survey the community (n=800) before and after the introduction of regular feedback on high-value stops, in order to ascertain community reactions; and (f) estimate the impacts of changes in stop patterns on crime.
The researchers will also engage in an on-going assessment of the partnership in an effort to describe the influences that supported or inhibited the evolution of the relationship and to identify any needed mid-course adjustments to strengthen the collaboration. The assessment will rely mainly on qualitative data, supplemented by surveys of APD personnel. ca/ncf