ABSTRACT
There was a time, perhaps until the end of the 1980s, when researchers could conduct their work in police departments and depart with a cheery, “Hope you buy the book!” But now practitioners in the criminal justice field have grown too sophisticated to buy into this model of research or evaluation model. Today, they want to know what is in it for them, during their term of office. At my first presentation to the command staff of the Chicago Police Department describing plans to evaluate their community policing initiative, a savvy district commander rose and made his fears clear: we would get in his way and take up his time, and a book would appear five years later telling everyone what he did wrong. He did not think this was a good idea. We agreed, but other models of researcherpractitioner partnerships are a lot of work, and risky. There were advantages to wearing white lab coats and insisting that we had to keep “hands off.”
