A shortage of ‘copaganda fascists’ and the need for more police pracademics

This essay examines the evolving relationship between policing and academia, highlighting the increasing significance of pracademics – police practitioners with scientific training who, like embedded criminologists, bridge the gap between research and practice. The historical development of police – academic collaboration has highlighted the challenges faced by embedded criminologists amid ideological polarization within universities. Academic hostility toward policing scholarship has combined with unstable research funding to hinder objective, data-driven reform from academia. Pracademics, positioned within police organizations, can translate research into practice, address operational needs, and foster evidence-informed decision-making more efficiently than external academics. I argue that increasing the number of pracademics within police departments is essential to improving policing quality, sustaining reform, and ensuring that criminological research and evidence-based policing remain empirically grounded and practically relevant to modern law enforcement.