Research partners in criminal justice: notes from Syracuse

Academics and practitioners recognize that research partnerships can benefit both research and practice. Many such partnerships, of varying scope and duration, have been formed over the past 20 years. However, while we have learned some lessons about such partnerships, we have much yet to learn about how research partnerships can be sustained and put to their greatest use. In this paper, we describe the functions that comprise the research partner role, and we draw from our experience as a research partner in one city – Syracuse, NY – to illustrate the performance of those functions and to reflexively distill from that experience some lessons for the development and maintenance of research partnerships. We discuss the factors that we believe shaped the success with which the partnership has operated, and the challenges that we confronted.