Collaboration Consequences: New Public Management and Police-Academic Partnerships

With increasing pressure on public organizations to demonstrate accountability, police services and public universities are being tasked with demonstrating how their institutional strategies are effective and economically efficient. In this paper, we draw on our own research collaborations with two different Canadian police services (Bluewater and Greenfield) on a similar community crime prevention strategy, Situation Tables. We illustrate how new public management practices are embedded in the political, economic, and organizational contexts that have inspired police-academic partnerships and invigorated the evidence-based policing movement in Canada. Our analysis illustrates how our partnerships were influenced by the performance strand of new public management that prioritizes the quantification of measures of outputs over qualitative evaluations of impact. We argue that these practices, if not interrogated, can jeopardize the integrity of evidence-based practice and policy development. Academic freedom must be retained when partnering with the police to ensure an examination of the implications of police practices.