Effecting change in policing through police/academic partnerships: The challenges of (and for) co-production

This chapter explores and assesses some of the possibilities and challenges in fostering police organisational change through police/academic partnerships that aspire to a model of ‘co-production’. It advances the case for knowledge generation that is socially distributed, application-oriented, trans-disciplinary and subject to multiple accountabilities, as the basis for a transformation in the way academics engage with policing practitioners and the value and application of knowledge, data and evidence within policing. Experiences of implementing the N8 Policing Research Partnership are deployed to provide insights into the critical challenges that such endeavours present both to dominant versions of evidence-based policing and to prevailing assumptions about co-production as methodology and philosophy. They foreground the problematic and often ignored issues of differential power relations, structural conflicts, differing professional interests and the need to manage these in ways that manifest open dialogue about differential roles, limitations and responsibilities, as well as safeguards to integrity.