The Police research contract

25/11/2015

In my column in the Herald today I outlined some serious concerns that I have with the New Zealand Police's restrictions on academic freedom.
Below is a copy of the contract that researchers must sign. The key sections are 8.2, 8.3 and 11.2(d).

7 Comments

Hera

25/11/2015 12:09:19 pm

How did the Ethics Committee respond? If you didn't allow it to go before, how about asking some of the academics who accepted those police contracts? Surely Ethics Committees have a responsibility to the research subjects which prevents them accepting contracts that allow the police to 'improve' the findings? And if not, why not?

Eric Crampton link

25/11/2015 05:23:47 pm

1. Agree that the police here are being dodgy;
2. Some of this isn't *that* different from provisions whenever dealing with confidential or sensitive Stats NZ data. The agreement we'd signed with them had us liable for up to $2k in fines on summary conviction if we breached any of the terms of data access. And, StatsNZ does do prior vetting of any of their used confidential data to make sure that you're using it as they said you could. And I have zero doubt that we'd be blacklisted from ever accessing confidential data if we did dodgy stuff with the data.

Now, I totally trust that StatsNZ is doing that for "maintain confidentiality" reasons rather the Police's more likely "keep the police from looking bad" reason. But it's hard to tell.

Paul

28/11/2015 06:10:45 pm

As a PhD student myself, I am concerned with the tenor of the Police Research Contract. There does seem to be more than an implicit position that the Police would like to make sure they don't look bad. The ambiguity in Clause 9.3 can be interpreted as interference, just simply because this was included. Concerning. If the police do not like the findings, they can go on public record to refute them after publication rather than attempt to manipulate the research before and during the process.

While there is always a need to ensure private information is protected - which applies to any research - I am not sure the police contract truly knows the difference between 'data' and 'information'. It is hard to argue that the police own a specific data point on crime even if they record it. However, there are rights in how they interpret data - and that's a big difference.

How data is interpreted should not be restricted and should be tested as to it's validity within academic or public circles - including the police themselves. The police should have the maturity to accept this applies to crime data.

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The Police research contract

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