Policing partnerships and changes in police professionalism in comparative perspective

• In Event: POL Panel 23. Police partnerships and collaboration

Abstract

We seek to enrich the literature on security networks and police partnership with the insights from the growing body of literature on policy sciences and collaborative public management. Following the work on “new professionalism” by Stone and Travis (2011) and Slanski (2011), in particular, we explore the ways in which security partnerships between police and other institutional and neighborhood stakeholders transform participants’ professional identity, including not only their partnership roles but their view of the policing profession. Based on ten years of field work with police in the United States and France, we track the ways in which partnership roles endow participants with greater professional autonomy and responsibility in developing tailor-made and innovative solutions, while promoting the development of a new knowledge community or “intelligence regime” specific to partnerships. To illuminate this process of professionalization, we draw on the literature about “boundary spanners” (Levina and Vaast, 2005; van Meerkerk and Edelenbos 2018). Our research draws on observation and more than 500 interviews in ten French and four American cities, where we examined police partnerships with other stakeholders on matters as diverse as riots, youth violence, the underground economy, soccer hooliganism, and domestic violence, we show how a variety of factors tend to promote or hinder collaborative experimentation and problem-solving by partnership participants. These factors include the professional heterogeneity of partnerships; whether they focus on a territory or a subject matter; the degree to which the partnership’s governance procedures have been formalized; and the extent to which analyses of security problems are negotiated between stakeholders with different points of view and divergent interests. We also draw on our fieldwork to suggest ways in which partnerships adapt their initial objectives and develop the autonomy to craft their own definitions of success and failure.

Authors

• Thierry Delpeuch, CNRS UGA PACTE

• Jacqueline E Ross, University of Illinois College of Law