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The mantra of evidence-based policy (EBP) suggests that endeavours to implement evidencebased policing will produce better outcomes. However there is dissonance between the rhetoric of EBP and the actuality of policing policy. This disjuncture is critically analysed using the case study of illicit drugs policing. The dissonance may be ameliorated by taking into account the policing context, and lessons from the extant evidence-based medicine, research translation and policy processes literature. Furthermore a developmental pathway notion suggests that it is only once research is fully embedded within the policy culture that critical reflections on the role of evidence become possible.
Background:
In public health emergencies, evidence, intervention, decisions and translation proceed simultaneously, in greatly compressed timeframes, with knowledge and advice constantly in flux. Idealised approaches to evidence-based policy and practice are ill equipped to deal with the uncertainties arising in evolving situations of need.
Key points for discussion:
There is much to learn from rapid assessment and outbreak science approaches. These emphasise methodological pluralism, adaptive knowledge generation, intervention pragmatism, and an understanding of health and intervention as situated in their practices of implementation. The unprecedented challenges of novel viral outbreaks like COVID-19 do not simply require us to speed up existing evidence-based approaches, but necessitate new ways of thinking about how a more emergent and adaptive evidence-making might be done. The COVID-19 pandemic requires us to appraise critically what constitutes ‘evidence-enough’ for iterative rapid decisions in-the-now. There are important lessons for how evidence and intervention co-emerge in social practices, and for how evidence-making and intervening proceeds through dialogue incorporating multiple forms of evidence and expertise.
Conclusions and implications:
Rather than treating adaptive evidence-making and decision making as a break from the routine, we argue that this should be a defining feature of an ‘evidence-making intervention’ approach to health.
This paper critically analyses the introduction of drug detection dogs as a tool for policing of illicit drugs in New South Wales, Australia. Using Kingdon’s ‘multiple streams’ heuristic as a lens for analysis, we identify how the issue of drugs policing became prominent on the policy agenda, and the conditions under which the alternative of drug detection dogs for illicit drugs policing came to be endorsed by decision makers. By applying Kingdon’s heuristic, we also consider how this approach may be used to illuminate the limitations of the evidence-based policy paradigm in the context of policing policy.
