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Public-private partnerships in Dutch policing: Advantages, bottlenecks, risks and opportunities of cooperation between the police and private and societal actors
Thu, September 4, 9:30 to 10:45am, Communications Building (CN), CN 2111Abstract
Police organisations are increasingly outsourcing security tasks and cooperating with private and societal organisations. Although such cooperation has its merits, it is also quite challenging. Mapping the advantages and opportunities and exploring ways to overcome bottlenecks and risks is important to efficiently organise public-private partnerships with the police. To this end, we conducted a comparative case study on cooperation between the police and private and societal actors in the Netherlands with regard to four specific crime types: shoplifting, human trafficking, missing persons and cybercrime in banking. We analysed numerous (internal) documents, conducted 56 interviews with relevant partners and performed observations on nine different occasions. This study was financed by the Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek- en Datacentrum (WODC) of the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security.
This presentation focuses on the advantages (e.g. dealing with limited resources, combining expertise), bottlenecks (e.g. difficulties regarding information-sharing, lack of structural cooperation and agreements) and risks (e.g. waterbed effect, function creep) of the public-private partnerships included in this study. We also discuss several approaches to overcome these bottlenecks (e.g. frequent contact, making (formal) agreements, working from a common interest) and opportunities to improve cooperation (e.g. a single point of contact at the police, a joint registration system for shoplifting crimes). Although many of these advantages, opportunities, bottlenecks and risks are case-related, they also share some common ground (e.g. difficulties regarding information-sharing). We reflect on these findings by discussing lessons learned with regard to setting up public-private partnerships with the police.