The Police - Researcher Partnership

The goal of this podcast is provide the police community with research information to improve their work or help solve a problem.  I could not do this without the research that is produced by scholars who have a solid working relationship with police agencies.  It’s helpful that this topic itself, police-researcher collaborations, has been studied to understand the motivations and barriers to this relationship.  Dr. Jeff Rojek from Michigan State University discusses his work in this area.  One of the more important findings from the research may be the result of what the study does not examine: both sides, the police and the researcher, have a responsibility to cultivate these relationships.

Main Topics

• Larger agencies are more likely to have a relationship with a researcher (no surprise there, really).
• A researcher may carry a larger burden when cultivating these relationships.
• Researchers should produce a research that is both tactically and strategically useful to the police.  Translate the research into a usable framework.

Citation: Rojek, J., Shjarback, J. A., Hansen, J. A., & Alpert, G. P. (2019). Present but not prevalent: identifying the organizational correlates of researcher-practitioner partnerships in US Law Enforcement. Police Practice & Research, 20(6).

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Welcome to the Police in Service Training Podcast. This podcast is dedicated to providing research evidence to street-level police officers and command staff alike. The program is intended to help the police and law enforcement community create better programs, understand challenging policies, and dispel the myths of police officer behavior. I'm your host, Scott Phillips. The fundamental reason I started this podcast was very simple. I wanted to make policing research available to the police. Unfortunately, most of the academic community does not do a very good job of getting their research into the hands of those who could really use the information. This does not mean there have been no efforts to connect the police with researchers. Federal grants attempt to cultivate those relationships, and the International Association of Chiefs of Police have advocated for better working relationships between police and researchers. The rationale for creating partnerships between the police and researchers is also simple. This is so they can combine their resources, their knowledge, and their skills, and through research develop an evidence-based approach to reducing crime or solving other problems the police department must be dealing with. Even now, after decades of federal grants and efforts to professionalize the police research association, the number of police research partnerships remains quite small. The question then becomes why? Why don't police agencies take advantage of research evidence that may increase their effectiveness of their role in society? And more to the point, why don't police agencies bring researchers inside the department itself? Fortunately, the disconnect between police agencies and researchers has become the topic of research itself. Today I'm joined by Jeff Rojek. He is the lead author of an article titled Present But Not Prevalent: Identifying the Organizational Correlates of Practitioner Researcher Partnerships in the U.S. Law Enforcement Community. And I goofed that one up, but I'm going to leave that in anyway. Jeff is an associate professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. And in a prior life, he spent four years as a police officer in Los Angeles. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Great to be here. I enjoyed conversation on these topics. So thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

Well, this is going to be a good one, I think, because when I saw this, it was almost like serendipity. Finally, after a while of looking at research articles, I saw one that basically explains why I'm trying to do this. And it also occurred about a couple of weeks ago, the uh American Society of Criminology criminologists, uh the the bi-monthly uh newsletter has an article on this very topic itself, so the timing is pretty good. Now, I mentioned your background at Michigan State and former LA. Uh, you've studied a variety of policing topics, including training and organizational justice. What drew your attention to this topic?

SPEAKER_00 3:01

Uh actually, you can't get away from it for the work I do. Um, you know, you work, everything I do, the topics you mentioned, use of force, whatever it may be, I'm working with agencies. I'm working to get data, to evaluate projects with them. Uh my key partner on this Jeff Falpert has a long career of doing the exact same thing. So we knew relationships are a cornerstone of the work we do.

SPEAKER_01 3:21

So when it comes to policing research, we also know that there are bigger fish. A lot of people are looking at the use of force, organizational justice, procedural justice, these kinds of things. Why is this particular area of inquiry uh why is this relevant to the police?

SPEAKER_00 3:36

Well, uh, I think it's relevant to the police. You know, as you point out, um this body of work has been growing in the recognition of this kind of what do you call translational criminology, we refer to it as research utilization, that can reach a span of officers, agencies passively reading our research to actively engaging with us. Right. And that was of interest to us because, again, the quality of research is going to depend on you building those relationships and how effective. And you know, to mention, this was actually part of a larger National Institute of Justice funded study that was specifically geared towards looking at researcher practitioner partnerships. This survey that was the basis of the study was just the first iteration, or I shouldn't say iteration, first component of that larger study to get a better understanding of what makes these partnerships work or what are the challenges. And so that's why it's a big piece. And I think the other concern was, you know, particularly at this point in time, were we losing a generation, many of those funding vehicles that may be helped people will, you know, do research of police, where we're losing a generation of scholars that knew what that meant to do build relationships, work with police to effectively solve and address police problems.

SPEAKER_01 4:44

Right. It's interesting you said that um the translational criminology, you're trying to which is kind of like when I ask people to be on the podcast, don't speak in research jargon. Make this interesting for the police to listen to, otherwise, within five minutes we're gonna lose them right off the bat. Now, your article includes a discussion of prior efforts to build the police research uh partnerships. And I touched on this uh uh in the introduction. The efforts to build a partnership seem to focus on larger agencies with funding by the NAJ and IECP going to big locations. Now, obviously, anybody that studies the police tries to study larger agencies, in my opinion, simply because you get a bigger bang for your buck. You're gonna have more cases, more incidents, more officers to deal with than dealing with five different small agencies. Your article also mentions the few studies in academic journals about these partnerships and the benefits for policing. But I was struck by by this particular thought. Are the police leaders reading these academic journals? And I know they're busy, I've I've dealt with police chiefs, but are these leaders exposed to the potential benefits if we're not if they're not likely to be reading the literature?

SPEAKER_00 5:54

Yeah, you know it's interesting because we did the this survey. Um one of the precursor questions in this asking, do they read journals, right? And we put three out there. Do you read professional journals like police chief, which is very common and available to most of those individuals? Right. Do you read things like NIJ, which funds research to come up with findings that are hopefully useful to them? And then they look at um academic journals. And what we found, probably not surprising, 80% said, yeah, I look at police chief or other professional journals. 50% said they look at things like NIJs, publications, reports, final reports, research and briefs. And about 30% said they looked at academic journals. Um, so you know, are they getting exposed, you know, to some degree? What, and that becomes a question, what exposes it? Do they have prior education? Um, which some of the work previously by IACP found that those who had master's degree versus a bachelor's versus less were more likely to engage in research. Uh, that makes sense. It's an exposure issue. Um, but part of it too is sometimes in academia, we have this kind of, if you remember the old Field of Dreams movie of, you know, if you build it, they will come. We have this idea if we research and publish it, they will read it. And it's not the case because it's just not in the stream of what's coming across very often for the police chief in their daily routine and also digestible, not a really kind of I hate to say it, sometimes, I mean, we find it geeky and interesting and important. It's critical for our stuff, but as a read, sometimes it can be dry. And you got a police chief who says, I need the points. What's the high points? What's the key findings? And we're not doing a very good job, also, I think, helping that translation to them.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

Yeah, I think that's one of the benefits of the um applied police brief applied police briefings, which is something that's been going on for a few years now, that they take a 20 or 30 page journal article and they condense it down to two pages. Simple, straightforward. And again, that's kind of the idea behind this podcast is to make it something that police chiefs can listen to while they're driving to work or a police officer can you know listen to while they're driving around on the on the patrol. Uh in your article, there's also some information um from the prior research, and you did kind of touch on this a little bit that uh you know 30% of the agencies uh said they you know often are you know always are influenced uh by their decisions are influenced by these by these uh studies. Now these numbers remind me of um a study that was done by Telep and Lawman, and I haven't had either of them on the podcast yet, but these were the uh receptivity to uh research. And uh basically what they found was I think similar numbers. Am I right about that? That that they're they're aware of it, 30% of them, but it's not like they're tapping into it very much.

SPEAKER_00 8:22

Yeah, and I don't recall their their exact numbers and and and you know, they've done good work. Um and they've been working in this area, and and I think with um Cynthia, she's done pretty much evidence-based police really trying to push really usable frameworks out there. And Cody is a former student of hers that now does great work himself. Um, you know, but I think it it's yes, it's out there, yes, it's usable, but to who? You know, one of the other things to think about is is who you survey. So if I survey a police chief, very much the research we do is very at a strategic level, right? Hotspots work, these things predict better prediction to hotspots or crime analysis. If you survey the line level officer, they need different things, right? They don't need a statistical journal article. There's a there's a scholar not far from here at uh he's in public policy, I'm gonna believe, at University of Michigan, David Thratcher, and he's written some good articles about what we need to shift policing for them to almost like a case study model, like you find in medicine, because that officer wrote that qualitative case study thing is more important about the nuances of how I identify and so forth. The strategic levels may be important for your, you know, your mid-management and above. So, with that said, you know, I wonder, although they are aware of it, they may struggle sometimes, depending on where you are in rank, of which one's useful to me, right? Which which is being, as I just mentioned, written in a way that I can clearly understand without knowing all the nuances of literature, and then which is it a strategic level piece of research or is it something else for me? And I think most of our stuff is at that strategic level, and it's making that translation for them in a more useful framework than just assuming, as I mentioned, we will publish it and they will come and read it and somehow use it. We need something to fill that gap.

SPEAKER_01 10:03

Yeah, I'm also reminded of the idea that if you're studying a larger police agency, um again, 18,000 agencies, and we'll be talking about this uh several times throughout the podcast. 18,000 agencies out there, and most of them, 89%, something like that, or 50 officers or less. So if if I were to do a study in Buffalo not too far away, there are 25 or 30 agencies in the area that are not Buffalo, not even remotely close to Buffalo size. So they might not think that this particular article is useful for them because it was done in Buffalo. So that's where I'm trying to push for, you know, privately on my own, having conversations with people pushed towards academics working with smaller agencies. So I think that's a good trans transition into this next question. Your article had also mentioned that these partnerships existed and uh were primarily based upon agency size. Again, bigger bang for your buck. Uh the smaller agencies don't partner with researchers, but small police agencies are all over the place. These jurisdictions still have their own particular problems that might be helped by researchers. So isn't this something academics are missing out on? The the tapping into these smaller agencies that are all over the place.

SPEAKER_00 11:11

Yeah, I I would agree. And I think you already hit on it, right? It's it's a bias among us, right? In a sense that we're looking to get funding, we're looking to publish articles, and it's easier to go to a single agency. If you look at a use of force, I need to go to an agency where useful force is enough prevalence, you know. Not judging the agency, but that's just simply where those things occur. Sure. Um, if you're working with small agencies, now you're trying to piece together multiple agencies, controlling petitions and some statistical analysis, the variation across those agencies. I I think it's it's also an orientation personal. So I have a doctoral student right now who has a background working in small rural law enforcement. He's doing real interesting work, for example, on staffing issues, because we're also the staffing work focuses on big agencies. And the nuances of what's needed in small agencies is much different. So he's doing a good job of that. And again, he's a really um interesting individual who goes out and is a doctoral student who's making relationships on his own with these small agencies, doing small things for them, building relationships. And I I don't think enough of us do in academic circles. I, you know, and and I mean say this. I don't know so much, and I give I'll probably get back to this point that the gaps we have here are so much on the law enforcement side wanting to not partner with us as it is the researcher side having their own biases, as you already pointed out, who they selected, who they engage with. Because I think you would find more of those 50 and under 20 that would be happy to work and engage with some research center to help them address some of their problems.

SPEAKER_01 12:35

Yeah, and even their problems might not be large crime problems. I was talking with somebody that uh uh almost universal problem uh that that exists in policing right now is hiring and retention. Yep. And so uh a a researcher might not be going to a small agency to study their crime problem, they might not have one. But the chief of police of a 50 officer agency might still want to know, okay, what what's the viewpoint of my officers? And how can I find this out? You know, I can ask these questions, but maybe I should get a researcher in here and you know, they can put together a survey, 20 questions, something like that. And suddenly you have a relationship between these two that can then solve, not maybe not solve a problem, but at least give the chief information that can help him deal with a potential problem down the line, higher in retention.

SPEAKER_00 13:17

And they're asked might be really mental. We were I was just talking about because I met with my student today, and you say some of it is they don't understand, they don't want they want to basically what you're asking for, they want to know what's going on about a problem, what's the research say about this, and you engage with them and simply go do a sort synopsis for them. And it's powerful for building that relationship for other opportunities, right? You know, if for us to ask for the survey of all their officers, give out time. Well, if I do a small help for them, then they're like, okay, yeah, you helped us out, and we help you with my officers, as well as make referrals to other small agencies in the area to help your project.

SPEAKER_01 13:47

Right. And the thing is, is that a lot of a lot of academics don't work at uh the R1 universities, but Michigan State, Albany, Cincinnati. When I was at Buffalo State, uh, 95% of anything I I got published was probably maybe even 98% was not funded at all. It was just because I was cultivating relationships, had these ideas and wanted to go out and do it. So I did it for free for them, wrote a simple uh white paper report for them about what the research said for their the the their use. And then the agreement was that I would publish it my own way. Now they would probably never read the article, but the the white paper was what they wanted. Now, okay, so your study was uh it was intended to provide some insight into the history, growth, and prevalence of the uh practitioner researcher collaborations in the United States. So you tried to go nationwide. How did you go about collecting uh data to understand things?

SPEAKER_00 14:37

So, and just a real quick preference, like I said, this was part of a larger NIG project, and it was stage one to identify those who had actually engaged in partnerships, which stage two was going to be going back and interviewing both the practitioner partner as well as the scholar partner to understand what makes the relationship work or what were the challenges in essence. So the first wave was doing this national survey, and we did it at about um 2,500 agencies, and no, no, it was shorter than that. It was uh a little over 2000, like 2015, I think. Um, and where we did is we we sampled two waves. We already knew there was somewhat of a bias, as you already point out, of partnerships more likely in bigger agencies. So we created two pools, one of a hundred more age officers, a hundred more agencies with a hundred more officers, which is, I don't know, it's it's somewhere between eight and nine hundred, um, including sheriffs, state, sure, local police. And then the other, the right remaining agencies, probably roughly about 1,200 or so. We randomly sampled from different segments, right, of different size agencies to make sure we had coverage from agencies that are less than 25 as officers, 50 to, you know, 25 to 50, etc., all the way up to 100. So it was to try to get that snapshot, but it was a little biased to the big because we knew there would be more agencies that more likely to gauge in partnerships that were bigger.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Right. Okay, so I I found that your dependent variable enough, again, maybe I'm not gonna lose people on this, but you know, stick around, everybody. Um, I found this interesting. You wanted to know if the police department had a quote, rigorous partnership with researchers in the past five years. How did you measure rigorous?

SPEAKER_00 16:06

So we actually used a framework that was put up by IECP a few years before we did this study. And it was trying to look at the depth of relationship, right? Because some might be, hey, just like we were talking about, they reached out, hey, can you give me, like, tell me what's going on? It was just a conversation or a short synopsis memo. It may have been they they handouts surveys to officers, but it really wasn't a collaborative effort. And those are valuable, right? And in fact, they're valuable for building more strength and more collaborative relationships as a starting point, as pointing out my students have been doing. But we called those cooperative cooperation, right? Just simple cooperation. The next level you could argue was when we actually engage in a research project together. We build it up, we design, evaluate something with the agency, and we called that coordination, right? A one-off project. And then the next level was um collaboration, where you've worked with a research partner multiple times on different projects. Because we see someone, I mean, those of us in the research community, you will know somebody who's got a big name, they've done a lot of work, and you see they're always working with Boston or DC or Miami, you know, Metrodade. And it's because they have a good working relationship. They provide something useful and the researcher gets a piece of what they need, and the agency gets a good quality work. So, anyways, what our focus was on those ones that were a little more engaging. So we cut out the cooperation and focused on agencies that only said I did a coordinated type relationship or active working partnership on a project or multiple ones over time.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

Okay. And again, um, I've also had this conversation with other people not on the podcast, but the the the the downside of that relationship is that you're kind of stuck with the one agency, but at least you're getting tons of information and you can always go back to them if you have a good working relationship. Yeah. I my advantage of not having all of that, which again, there's a there's an advantage to that for somebody like you. My advantage was if something just crossed my mind that I wanted to study it, I figured out a way to do it. So I I was a little more free. And this is this is the balancing act between anybody who takes a position anywhere else, whether it's a smaller college, a a uh an uh R1 or an R2 university. I don't want to get into the details there. But the point here is that yeah, you can get data and depends on how much of an effort you want to do and how how restricted you want to go.

SPEAKER_00 18:17

So all right, now you do get different pressures, right? And we're facing different pressures and we have to we have to exhibit. I'm sure we'll get to this probably when we start kind of thinking big picture from here, but you hit right on and out. There are different pressures, and we both have to respond to them.

SPEAKER_01 18:31

Right. Now, like any good researcher, you you didn't simply look at the size of the agency because that was part of your study, and if they had a partnership with uh a researcher, uh can you briefly discuss the other variables that you use to explore this police uh researcher relationship?

SPEAKER_00 18:50

Yeah, sure. So the size, we had to include the size, we sampled because we knew this. You had to you had to account for is it a police department versus a sheriff's department or a state police, those kind of things. It's straightforward. But the other, remember we talked about beginning this idea of research utilization. On one end is they passively look at our research, other ends they gauge in partnerships, and we want to know is a relationship, is there someone who's more inclined to use the research or look to it, more inclined to essentially gauge in partnerships. Now it's a bit of a chicken and an egg thing, right? Because it could be they gauge in a partnership first and all of a sudden, oh, I got exposed to research. This is great. I'm gonna look read more. We we can't control for that in this kind of study because it's a one-time evaluation and count for behavior before. But the things we looked at is, you know, do you use research to um form your decisions? Strategic decisions. This is a leadership of agencies. We also asked them about do you use specific um forms of which already talked about? Do you read professional journals? Do you, you know, for policing, do you read NIJ reports? Do you look at academic journals to see if there's that relationship between are those who are more inclined to essentially engage, particularly in NIJ or academic research, to engage in partnerships? And then of course they could respond, we don't do any of that. Um so we're looking at those this the kind of coalition of a coalition of do they are they engaged in the kind of research literature, or are they more likely to gauge in partnerships? Because there's a uh arguably you could say there's an understanding of value in that relationship.

SPEAKER_01 20:21

Okay, so basically, what were the results? Uh what was important to the this police researcher partnership, and and just as important as what you find was important, what was not important? What what did what didn't co uh you know bring these people together?

SPEAKER_00 20:35

You know, it it's interesting, the size. And if we kind of had an increment case, you know, if you look at the first analysis we looked at, just looked at agencies, classified them as 100 or more sworn officers or less than 100. Well, those who had 100 more were much likely to engage and research or engage in partnerships. Um, and then when we looked at a sample of just those of 100 or more, we you know siphoned about 100 versus 200 versus 300. As the size went up, they were much more likely to engage in partnerships. So the bigger you are, the more likely to engage in partnerships.

SPEAKER_01 21:05

Makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 21:06

Other factors were that were interesting to us were this engagement, these things we just talked about, the literature. So those who were initially, and and those who were um we looked at all agencies, not just 100 more, those who were more likely to um read a professional journal were less likely to engage in partnerships, which was interesting. We can talk about a bit on a second get that in a second. But those who are more likely to read NIJ or read a research article were more likely to engage in partnerships. Um and so that was interesting. And I addressed that on two ends. One is interesting because the less likelihood maybe it's the trusted source, right? When I read a professional journal, that's a peer, right? Generally writing in police chief magazine. And that is more interesting. So that's not engaging me. I I trust sources, relationships of fellow officers, federal agencies for information. This is my assumption. But Know I'm less that doesn't gear me towards and maybe makes me less likely to look to the academic community for answers. But if I'm reading NIJ, which is producing research produced by academics, or recently academic journals, that would maybe be an indicator I'm more inclined. Um, what was really interesting and made NIJ probably really happy because they funded this, is the biggest draw though, of all those different journals that predicted, it wasn't if I read academic journals engaged in partnership. I was much more likely to, if I read NIJ reports, to engage in partnerships. So it was that NIJ factor that was statistically the biggest uh factor to contribute to whether you engaged in a partnership, which again NIJ funded this, so they were probably very happy with that. And they had nothing to do with it, I'll say that.

SPEAKER_01 22:45

Well, you now you're saying something there a moment ago. I didn't I didn't catch this in in the in the article, and maybe maybe you didn't say it in the article in a way that you just said it. But uh you said, okay, so a police chief is reading something written by another police chief in one of those um professional journals. So there's an aspect of legitimacy and trust to what this this author is saying. I'm kind of curious, there are not a ton of us out there, but I'm wondering if this is maybe this is another question in somebody's research in the future. Are police chiefs more willing to pull in a researcher who has police experience? Like you said, you had four years with LA, I had three years with Houston. We we see uh well several others. I can, you know, name a half a dozen off the top of my head. I don't want to get get their heads too big from the podcast. But I'm just wondering if we ask those chiefs, just that general question, if if a researcher came to you who had X number of years with prior law enforcement experience and now has a PhD and wants to do a study with you, would you would you trust them? Again, I'm just throwing this out as an idea for you know your next study.

SPEAKER_00 23:48

Yeah, you know, uh it's never hurt me, I'll be honest with you. And um, it opens doors. Uh, it's generally in the discussion early on. It helps open doors, it doesn't guarantee the door stays open if I act like a fool. Um, but I I you know, you look at some folks who've been very successful. Some of the mentors are mine are out there, like uh Dave Klinger, Dave Carter, who both had law enforcement backgrounds. Um, some of the newer scholars in the field, I think of like Ian Adams, Scar Marcos, who are great faculty, you know, researchers, but they have great, you know, they have an interesting background in law enforcement that really informs their work. So yeah, I think it helps. I mean, I'll be very honest, I never not that this was ever my intention, but I remember doing surveys in a roll call in an agency in California one time, and the um the it was a lieutenant was introducing me and he goes, Hey, he was formerly one of us, so he's not out to get us. He's the good, he knows what the problems are and stuff. Whether that was my intention or not, it didn't matter. It bought this kind of like, hey, we're not going to put up any barriers to you. So be it. You know, do your thing. Now, if you act again, you act like a fool, then we will find that's a whole nother thing. I when we did this project, the interview side, it was an agency of the large agency in the United States, and made the point of, hey, my agency has a lot of pitfalls, fitfalls in trying to do research. And if we don't like you, we just let you fall into one we don't help you. Because they're not obligated to, right? It's for us to behave as researchers. So um so that's a roundabout way to your question, but I do think it can help at times. Yeah, that's on a trust side.

SPEAKER_01 25:13

It it's it's it could be it could be one of those things, like you said, maybe it'll bring you in the door. I like that, but it won't keep the door open for you. Back to your study. Give us a couple of the implications for police uh agencies, personnel, leaders, whatever.

SPEAKER_00 25:26

You know, I I think there's a there's a variety. Some are direct and some are kind of bigger picture um from this project. You know, for one, we we found this relationship that where if they lead Police Chief Magazine, they were less likely to engage in partnership. If they read NIJ and so forth. I think part of it is you would argue we need to do better at tailoring in some of those books you mentioned earlier, like Cynthia Lalan and Coley Tulpe and their efforts in translational criminology are really trying to do this, as of others. Trying to find ways that we package to essentially a customer and the police leadership, our research, our articles, our research in a way that is not um drab, dry, difficult, whatever you want to say. It's it's what's important to us, but what they don't. And for example, we I did a project um and we it was in an influence by this uh with Board of Patrol three years ago, looking at morale and those type of issues. And one of the things we did is we we produced a report that was in multiple phases. The the statistical analysis was simply almost like a flow chart in the executive summary. Someone wanted to read the first five pages, they got the gist of what we thought found was related to morale issues. So we went into the report, it was a little more depth, more of the details. The statistical complexity statistical analysis was not in there, but um, you know, we present tables of, you know, kind of like we did in this report, what things predict what and the outcome. We simply highlighted if it had a positive or negative relationship and whether it was significant or not. And they put all the you know detailed aspects of the actual analysis in there. But then I created an appendix that had all the details of the analysis so people could digest what they wanted out of it, right? I wasn't gonna have just a complicated um statistical analysis in a paper that, like, I someone looking at it's like, I can't read this, I'm not gonna look on. So it was different ways of digesting. That's just one example. But I think that's one thing, right? And I think you get into recognizing that we they use this terminus because we're not the only ones in policing. Medicine does this, et cetera. Um, you know, medicine, nursing, schools, they all have these working on these relationships with researchers. And you know, you look at this argument of in these all-bar areas, these two communities, right? You have the policing community that has challenges that are answerable to their community members, to their political officials, a budget, um, now social media and all those demands. Right. And then you have us where our demands are what the university judges me by. And you were kind of alluding to this before. I need to get publications of good journals. I need to get at our top research university, I need to get grant dollars. And so those two agendas don't always overlap. Not to mention, as we're just talking about the jargon issue, right? How I have to speak to be respected in my community is one way, but it might not translate well to them. Um, and it's it's not a superior or inferior type argument. It's simply it's a two different languages we have to speak that make things work more effective in both communities. And so finding the way to bridge those things are important.

SPEAKER_01 28:25

Yeah, I just want to jump in for a second. It's almost like uh I've had doctors who had terrible bedside manner because they would just talk to you as if they were talking to a colleague. I'm not a medical doctor, so but you got to talk in languages that I get.

SPEAKER_00 28:37

Yeah. You know, it reminds me of I had a working at other university and we had a really skilled statistician, and some of the students would come to me, doctoral students, go, Well, he's so smart, it's so difficult for him to teach us at our level. And I'm like, No, that's his job to teach you at your level. That's an unacceptable excuse. And I think that's if anything, and it's a again, I don't want to put in the context of policing, it's smart or not smart, it's different goals. I mean, I you know, I we we go as you and I, we all had to learn, we're getting our PhDs to write a certain way, present analysis in a certain way. You serve to write this like a different language. Um, that's great for us, but most people don't read what we do, and we're wanting to have an impact on folks that actually do practical work. Well, we're gonna have to find a way to get rid of and get to the key points and make you know what it is that we need. And I think, you know, one of the things I always say is um, you know, and again, I was just talking to my grad students today about this, you know, there are different forms of knowledge, right? And so we're providing empirical knowledge, right? We're measuring things, finding outcomes, etc. Um, you know, you work for practitioners, they have tacit knowledge, right? They learn that knowledge you learn by doing trial and error that makes things work in their daily work environment, and that's critical. It's critical because they have a lot of things to offer us, the nuance that we just don't understand because we're not doing it every day, and why our policies and ideas may not work because we're not thinking of a number of different things. Um, and then again, we offer maybe some knowledge that looks like, hey, you've been trying this, this is your impact relative for X versus Y in your strategies. So I think there's both to offer. And, you know, if I'm gonna take and we, you know, we wrote this report, we kind of, I want to say it came down, but made an argument. I've found a ton of agencies that are willing to work with researchers, they're open. Um, you know, I think sometimes we give a vision police are you know resistant to outsiders. I've had a lot of success engaging with law enforcement executives and them going, yeah, that's really interesting. I'd like to do that. I don't find the problem there. Where I find the problem is sometimes in the research community that wants to do this work. Um, it's it's not sitting behind a desk and running analysis and and kind of doing things, it's negotiating relationships, it's negotiating topic areas where, hey, they need something practical for their work and you want to look at something from a more research point of view. How do we find something that works together? Kind of like you were pointing out. This is something they want to do, I can write a paper on this, or sometimes it's hey, let me do you. You want to you want some help here? I'll do this. Hey, will you let me survey your officers on this total different topic? It's about building relationships. I mean, at the end of the day, and and uh not all members of the academic community are good at building relationships and getting getting their hands dirty in essence.

SPEAKER_01 31:15

Maybe that's the thing that the academic community needs to do is is change its perspective on what we can deliver, how we, as you mentioned in words, how we package our uh our talents and our skills that make a contribution to what these agencies are trying to do. Yeah, so is there anything else that you wanted to uh mention that we didn't hit on?

SPEAKER_00 31:34

No, no, I think that's a that's a good point. Just to point on your point, you know, one of the differences in those communities is again, you and I've worked there, we've worked in different things. When you work in a structural organization of police, you do what you're asked to do. There's expectations. We have a phenomenal amount of freedom in the academic community, and sometimes have the ability to go, no, whereas as a police officer, I couldn't say no, I'm not gonna do it. I said yes, I had to do this. Whereas in uh in academic, I'm like, Yeah, I'm not just not gonna do that. It's funny, I engage with my kids and their sports, all these other parents that work in different work environments, and I rose how lucky we are because we have that freedom. But that I think that goes to the extent, like you're pointing out, it has to be a will on the part of the researcher that I want to do this, I want to have that impact with agencies, I want to gain work with them on you know their grounds and their terms and do things that's useful for them. And at the same time, it has to give something useful my work environment as well. And so negotiating that.

SPEAKER_01 32:24

Right. And you also said something a moment ago that just struck me that the the idea of you know, maybe this is time for an academic to take the summer when they're not teaching any classes, don't teach any summer classes, and have that relationship that you developed over the Christmas break with this relation with this police agency and go spend the summer hanging out there. If you've never done the job, it's fascinating, it's interesting, the environment is is different, but then you start hanging out, you learn, you go to the coffee shop, the Tim Hortons up in this particular part of this country, and and you you learn those little things that all of a sudden it's like shit, I never thought of that. And then you make yourself a note, and that that that goes into the a question you might you might ask down the line. Jeff, this was great information. We're gonna be running out of time in a second here, but I can't thank you enough for coming on.

SPEAKER_00 33:09

I appreciate it. I appreciate uh taking a look at our research and uh broadcasting to others.

SPEAKER_01 33:13

It's been good stuff. You have a great day. Yeah, you too. Thanks.