Recent events have raised several new challenges for law enforcement agencies and placed existing and long-standing concerns regarding policing in a new light. In early 2020, the global COVID-19 pandemic led to drastic and significant adjustments in people’s routines and lifestyles. Not only did law enforcement and other emergency services have to respond differently to calls for service with fewer resources, but patterns of crime, disorder, accidents, and other events that the police handle also changed. Agencies reported declines in certain calls for service and crimes related to the routines of pre-COVID life, but reported upticks in other crimes such as gun violence or domestic conflicts. Most recently and unfortunately, there has been a return of mass shootings in the United States, which had declined during the COVID pandemic. Additionally, some police agencies became responsible for enforcing public health mandates (i.e., mask wearing, social distancing, business closures) during the pandemic, placing law enforcement at the center of several political flashpoints related to COVID-19.

Amid the global pandemic came the death of George Floyd in May 2020, illuminating long-standing concerns about police use of force and accountability, along with racial and ethnic disparities throughout the criminal justice system. The public protests that followed throughout that summer presented substantially greater challenges to the police as they worked to manage crowds; civil unrest; and, in some cases, protester violence directed toward them. Finally, the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, highlighted concerns regarding inconsistencies and possible implicit biases in police responses to riots and protesters and further concerns about possible white supremacists, insurrectionists, and related sympathizers among police ranks.

These events and concerns have raised questions about the role of police in society and whether police are best equipped to handle many of the tasks and public concerns to which they currently respond. This, in turn, has fueled the call for defunding the police and shifting certain social service responsibilities away from law enforcement to other organizations. Defunding the police challenges previous conceptualizations of community policing and problem-solving, where the police played a direct and preventative role by being involved with many non-crime issues believed to be related to public safety. For example, in the last decade, police agencies prioritized working with non-governmental agencies to respond better to homelessness, mental distress, and drug addiction. Many agencies were amenable to diverting low-level offenders and youth away from the criminal justice system rather than using arrest as a solution. However, the defund and reinventing policing movements have suggested that police limit their activities or roles only to matters directly related to their law enforcement mission (for example, the investigation of crimes that have already occurred). Defunding has been interpreted in many ways, but could include letting other entities handle social service or general community safety concerns, either by establishing more clearly defined roles for the police or by more fully transferring these responsibilities elsewhere.

Calls for greater police accountability and civilian oversight boards have also reshaped the concept of community policing more generally, pressing police chiefs to look inward at internal affairs, accountability, and management practices and policies that are connected to their relationship with the community rather than to external activities to “co-produce” public safety. The COVID-19 pandemic has further strained community-police relationships by limiting or reducing traditional interactions and opportunities for discourse between the police and communities (i.e., community meetings, community police academies, community-police working groups). These issues have had indirect effects, impacting long-standing challenges of police recruitment (and especially the recruitment of people of color) and affecting how law enforcement will deal with the rising violence notable in some jurisdictions.

Given these developments, a central question for IACP’s Research Advisory Committee is what are the impacts of these recent events on policing research and police-researcher partnerships?

In the last two decades, researchers and practitioners have forged strong links under the broad umbrella of evidence-based policing. Federal initiatives like the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s Strategies for Policing Innovation (formally the Smart Policing Initiative) and the National Institute of Justice’s LEADs program are two examples of funding mechanisms that have attempted to encourage the development and application of police research to facilitate police reform. Police researchers have enjoyed increased openness by police agencies to research and evaluation, and many agencies began to hire and support in-house crime analysts and researchers. Officer-led organizations like the Societies for Evidence-Based Policing in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand also began pushing for greater reliance on data and research within their agencies. However, the new challenges and fundamental changes in policing brought on by recent events have also called for revisiting the purpose, processes, and topics of policing research.

A Revised Post-2020 Framework for Police Research

Significant changes in 2020 prompted a revised framework for policing research that both law enforcement and their research partnerships should consider. This framework includes an urgent call for more responsive and timely research, the need to build research evidence on new topics (or existing topics but within a post-2020 context), the consideration of new data sources for research purposes, a greater commitment to action research where agencies are more actively involved as research findings unfold, and the greater use of existing research knowledge.

Research on New Topics & New Contexts

Several emerging issues (and re-emerging issues) do not have a strong evidence base to develop sound policy. More research on these topics is needed (as well as exploring more accurate outcome measures associated with them), including understanding and evaluating

• shifting roles and expectations of police in democratic societies;
• alternative models of public safety response and whether they are effective, including multiagency partnerships and alternatives to arrest strategies for juveniles, unhoused populations, and those with substance use disorders and mental health challenges;
• alternative models of public safety dispatch (or integrated dual dispatch systems) and in-bound 911 call triage;
• psychology and science of crowds, crowd management, and protest response;
• law enforcement’s role and response to serious and long-term public health problems;
• increase in violence in 2020 in some jurisdictions and subsequently how to prevent and reduce it given post-2020 constraints on resources and increased boundaries of the police;
• post-incident investigation techniques, including detective use of investigative processes, technologies, and information systems, and cross-unit collaboration;
• extent to which implicit bias impacts operations in law enforcement and a greater understanding of what leads to disparate outcomes from police activities across different racial and ethnic groups;
• post-2020 recruitment and retention, including what might positively and negatively impact recruitment and retention;
• internal affairs, accountability infrastructure, and the role of unions in affecting accountability infrastructure;
• impact of changing public perception and increased public accountability on the mental health and well-being of officers and how to mitigate those impacts;
• domestic terrorists and extremist groups, in particular those who may have members or sympathizers among police ranks;
• continued focus on mass casualty events that were becoming more lethal prior to COVID-19 and that have seemingly returned as COVID-19 restrictions are being lifted; and
• evaluation research on the effectiveness of citizen review boards or accountability groups on a variety of outcomes.

New Types of Data Sources & Analyses

With the new demands for research, researchers should consider analysis and research on various data and information sources that may have been nonexistent or not have been researched before 2020. This includes considering how new data and evidence from current practices and events might inform more rigorous evaluation and analysis. Such data may also require various qualitative and quantitative methods that may have not been regularly used in the past. These sources include

• after-action reports and other documents on protest response and crowd control, which can provide empirical clues about how agencies responded and the effectiveness of those responses;
• similarly, after action-reports and other documents on COVID-19 responses;
• accountability and internal affairs data, either not readily available or nonexistent before 2020, such as complaints data, use-of-force information, or body-worn camera data;
• new data elements created because of social justice concerns, such as the addition of race and ethnicity variables in police data, to help better understand justice disparities and interventions and to mitigate those disparities;
• intervention data such as reports on specialized responses that may now be documented (e.g., co-responder/CIT responses);
• improved data collection to understand and prevent crime and victimization within unhoused populations;
• school-based data such as those collected by school resource officers;
• body-worn camera and other video data, which can provide a wealth of information and be used for systematic social observations of officer-public interactions;
• NIBRS data as they become more available; and
• data collected from protests.

Law enforcement agencies and researchers should also consider that significant adjustments have been made to existing data sets due to the events of 2020. For example, how calls for service, incident, and arrest data are generated and recorded may have been impacted because of COVID-19 and may need to be interpreted differently across the different months of 2020.

A Stronger Commitment to Action Research & Application

Given the new challenges posed by the events of 2020, there needs to be an even stronger commitment to on-the-ground action research and evaluation by both police agencies and researchers. New reforms that are being proposed (defunding, body-cameras, community accountability boards, diversions) will need to be evaluated to determine if they deliver on their promised outcomes. Also needed is more insight into whether existing practices work or do not work, how they work and under what circumstances, and the unintended consequences that might result from particular interventions. This can improve understanding of what is currently happening within policing organizations and communities; improve collaboration and learning between police, community members, and researchers; and strengthen the application of research to on-the-ground challenges as they arise.

It is also essential to acknowledge that, before 2020, despite the availability of research, the use of research in policing was only beginning to emerge. Existing research on crime, police organizations and their activities, collective efficacy, and police-public interactions, as well as evaluation research on crime prevention and control, police legitimacy, and other police reforms had been well underway but under-utilized. Some research is still applicable, while other research may need to be updated given the significant changes in policing that occurred in 2020. For example, recent increases in gun crime, which preceded 2020 but appear to be accelerating in the United States, underscore the need to reexamine evidence-based demand and supply-side approaches to control gun crime, but with a recognition of how those approaches might be impacted by recent changes in community sentiment and gun laws. A review and consideration of international research findings also can assist with recent challenges. Other examples include international evaluations and case studies that offer differing perspectives and evidence concerning alternative approaches to protest response and management. Finally, research needs to be made more accessible to the law enforcement community, as most of it resides behind firewalls that are difficult to access.

Finally, while some strides have been made to translate and apply research knowledge into policing organizations and operations, a better understanding of how this effectively occurs is needed. What strategies have police agencies successfully used to institutionalize the use of research into daily policies and practices? The events of 2020 will likely continue to reshape the environment in which policing and police research will be implemented. This new reality is different from the social environment in which police research previously was conducted. Law enforcement professionals and researchers must challenge the current understanding of police research and its utilization by police organizations and identify whether what was known before 2020 translates into today’s world.

Please cite as

IACP Research Advisory Committee, “A Framework for Post-2020 Researcher-Practitioner Partnerships,” Police Chief Online, July 14, 2021.