Collaboration Between Researchers and Law Enforcement Agencies

Michel Moore Well I think the most important thing is that we need to have trust that the researcher is going to be--is both confident in the field of study, that they have an understanding of effective research methods and designs that can truly tease out the information in the data so that we can look at it together and evaluate it to determine what are areas for improvement? What are some of the impacts--negative as well as positive? The concept of "Are the researchers getting it?" meaning are they really hooking up with the data and with the agency and its practices, its procedures, its protocols, or is this just a scientific review? And really the desire for us and a practitioner is that we want to roll their sleeves up and be elbow deep in this, where they are alongside our detectives as well as our managers, as well as being able to talk with senior management to understand the complexities of the field. And part of the way of us knowing that is by seeing some of the data, some of the way they start shaping--not just the data description, but also the summaries, as well as early drafts of a direction that they wanna go. Because it's not a negotiated issue, but it's one of those ones that we can look at and say "This is fair. We don't have an agenda going on. We don't have an advocacy of a predisposed destination that they wanna be at." We need to look at this, and while we can suspect where we might find ourselves a year or two years out, we have areas that we wanna study because we wanna see are there weaknesses in one particular area, one particular operation or another within the department. That first or early drafts give us a validation if you will, that they're looking independently, but objectively and fairly, and there's not just one interpretation. And also there's opportunities for us to get early adopting. What are some things that we need to do right now? We don't need to wait until this study is done. We don't need to wait another six months or nine months to get this published. What can the agency start doing now? And in this study one of the areas was training. Over half the people there indicated that they were woefully undertrained, under-resourced in understanding the complexities and having the proper tool set to really work on this field of sexual assault. And that allowed us to design, working with our training folks. LAPD has an entire training regimen, as you would with any organization of some 13,000 people--professionals that began saying "Ok, what are some of these initial findings? Talk to us, describe what you're seeing."--this being the researchers as well as our practitioners--and began addressing some of those shortcomings.

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