Fragile alliances: culture, funding and sustainability in police‐academic partnerships

Abstract

Background: Police‐academic partnerships have developed significantly over the past decade or so, spurred on by the expansion of the evidence-based policing movement, the increasing value attached to impactful research in the academy, the ascendance of the professionalisation agenda in the police, and the growing necessity of cross-sectoral collaborations under conditions of post-financial crisis austerity. This trend has given rise to a burgeoning literature in the discipline of criminology which is concerned with charting the progress of these partnerships and setting out the ideal conditions for their future expansion.Aims and objectives: we advance a sympathetic critique of this literature, adding a note of caution to its largely optimistic outlook.Methods: we do this by combining a narrative review of the literature on police‐academic partnerships with insights from elsewhere in the social sciences and observations from our experience of running the International Strand of the N8 Policing Research Partnership.Findings and discussion: while we recognise that police‐academic partnerships have certainly come a long way, and have the capacity to make important contributions to police work, we argue that they remain ‘fragile’ alliances, beset with fractious occupational cultures, unreliable funding streams and unsustainable inter-institutional relationships. We also reason that the structures underpinning this ‘fragility’ do not represent problems to be overcome, for they help to protect the integrity of the two professions.Conclusion: we conclude by offering pragmatic measures for sustaining police‐academic partnerships during those difficult periods characterised by cultural dissonance, a paucity of funding and the turnover of key personnel.