The Value of ‘Pracademics’ in Enhancing Crime Analysis in Police Departments

Over the last 40 years, American policing has gone through a period of significant change and innovation ( Weisburd and Braga, 2006 ). In what is a relatively short historical time frame the police began to reconsider their fundamental mission, the nature of the core strategies of policing, and the character of their relationships with the communities that they serve. Three changes seem most notable ( Sklansky, 2006 ). First, a mantra of community policing has replaced the professional model of policing. Secondly, civilian oversight, once strongly resisted by police departments, has become much more commonplace. And thirdly, and perhaps most striking, police workforces have become much more diverse and better educated. As police departments accumulate larger shares of officers with college and advanced degrees, these organizations naturally enhance their capacity to innovate in response to new challenges and recurring problems. The presence of ‘pracademics’ inside police departments, very loosely defined as ‘skilled police officers with academic training’ ( Huey and Mitchell, 2016 ), seems like a particularly important development in the policing field. The ongoing applied academic work of doctors and other public health professionals in teaching hospitals have led to important advances in diagnosing the epidemiology of persistent health problems and developing and testing new programmes and treatments to control the spread of disease and reduce the incidence of injuries and other harms. Police pracademics could work in similar ways to advance the capacity of the police profession to address crime and disorder concerns, police–community relations, officer misbehaviours, and other management challenges. By virtue of their experiential knowledge, police pracademics can also enhance existing research partnerships with external academics by ensuring proposed projects are sensitive to real-world conditions and by translating the importance of scientific inquiry to their police department colleagues.