Working with others: Future policing partnerships

Roles, responsibilities, policies, and practices of contemporary police officers and organisations evolve and adapt to changing needs of their communities, society, and the world around them. Continued police policy and practice review, adaptation, and evolution correspond to increasingly complex, dynamic, and persistent manifold public safety and security issues within Australia and beyond. Further, many public policy safety and security issues extend beyond conventional regional, state, or national boundaries, stretching the limits of traditionally conceived police knowledge and policy capacities. Critically, many police policy and practice adaptations and expansion of roles and responsibilities developed ad hoc as police leaders and organisations attempted to meet new threats without requisite human, financial,or technological resources, knowledge, skills, and/or partnerships. Increasingly, within Australia and elsewhere around the globe, complex criminal justice policy issues cannot be understood, ameliorated, or resolved without considering sustainable multisectoral analysis, collaborations, debate, reflection, and application of evidence-based responses (Deckert & Sarre, 2017). At the core of this process is the need for public policy collaboration and partnerships that can share policy responsibility, knowledge, effective practices, and overcome the inherent inflexibility of traditional organisational and sectoral boundaries.