Doing Research with Police for DUMMIES

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Doing Research with Police forDUMMIES

• Victoria Herrington
• Charles Sturt University

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Overview

• The challenges of policing research
• One dummys guide to doing policing research
• Being an embedded researcher
• Reflections on the role of a policing academic

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Disclaimer

• Drawing on research work in the UK and Australia
• Conducted from a variety of positions
• From the outside looking in
• From the inside looking around
• With one foot in each camp
• Theoretical promiscuity and a focus on applied
  research

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Understanding our challenging relationship

• Access
• Difficulty getting under the thin blue skin
• Maintaining methodological integrity
• Dissemination
• Irreconcilable differences?

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Communication
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Developing research with police

• ensures that research is grounded and useful
• Encourages buy in from the organisation and
  hierarchical sponsorship
• Requires creativity and flexibility on the part
  of the researcher
• Timelines
• Identifying win/win research questions

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Achieving access

• Organisational vs. individual access
• Supported by effective consultation during the
  research development stage
• Identifying a suitable champion
• Framing of research proposals in their most
  useful light
• Requires a reorientation of the role of the
  academic as a resource for policing

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Developing relationships

• Maintaining strategic (hierarchical) and local
  relationships the pincer!
• Identifying what one can bring to the
  relationship (cake, time, a genuine interest in
  understanding the police perspective)
• Visibility, accessibility, and familiarity
• Humour, empathy, compassion, patience,
  trustworthiness, tenacity and personality

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Contextual awareness

• Research as a privilege
• Understanding of competing demands, (political)
  agendas and legislation
• Methodological realism
• Requires flexibility and a willingness to out
  manoeuvre obstacles
• Awareness of the impact of a critical researcher

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Sensitive dissemination

• Balance the competing demands of scoring academic
  brownie points and maintaining confidentiality
• Distinguish b/t airing organisational dirty
  laundry and useful dissemination
• Sharing results in a palatable manner
• they only read the summary!

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Challenges for an embedded researcher

• Positivist guilt
• how close is too close?
• Staff turnover and maintaining relationships
• Awareness of (political) agendas
• Academic career suicide?

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A model for policing research?

• If the end game is to improve policing, we need
  to
• Research with police
• Reframe academia as a resource to assist policing
• Propose and conduct useful research
• Develop and maintain trusting relationships
• Not forget what gets done well

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Academics need to be inside the policing car, not
just standing at the lights offering to wash the
windscreen
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• Victoria Herrington
• vherrington_at_csu.edu.au
• Tel [phone]