Factors influencing cross-border knowledge sharing by police organisations: an integration of ten European case studies

Abstract

The globalisation of crime means there is an increasingly vital need for effective sharing of knowledge by police organisations across international borders. However, identifying the complexities and challenges of this aspect of international collaboration has been relatively neglected in previous research. The research reported in this paper therefore set out to identify the major barriers and facilitators of international knowledge sharing. Research teams in ten European countries produced ten case studies of knowledge sharing across borders, either involving direct cooperation between police forces in different countries or through international agencies such as CEPOL or INTERPOL. The integrative findings showed that the major influences on knowledge sharing could be theoretically categorised in terms of organisational factors (e.g. technological and staff capabilities), inter-organisational factors (e.g. quality of relationships, shared visions and systems), inter-country factors (e.g. bilateral conventions, legislation) and knowledge characteristics (e.g. clarity, legal sensitivity). Practical implications include standardising technology systems across countries, improving interorganisational trust through exchanges and physical co-working, developing police members' knowledge and skills with regards to collaborative working and creating joint agreements and visions. Research implications highlighted the need to test the findings in non-European contexts and to comparatively focus on specific types of collaboration.

SoK: Cross-border Criminal Investigations and Digital Evidence

“…In [16], the authors use a sound methodology to create ten use cases and collect the challenges related to knowledge sharing between organisations across international boundaries. The authors classify such challenges and provide some recommendations to overcome them.…”

“…The latter is related to another struggling challenge: the lack of resources for cross-border collaborations, which is critical since the proper training of personnel and the enhancement of their technical skills are crucial to guarantee quality and timely investigations. Notwithstanding, beyond finding qualified personnel, the budget devoted to this goal has to be enough to guarantee not only the engagement of professionals but also to provide them with the proper tools and equipment [16,89,123].…”

“…A nice addition to these tools could be to leverage the prosecution of criminal activities by using Eurojust's recommendations [43], which offer the legal framework to decide, in the case of a criminal activity that is being prosecuted in different member states, which of them is in a better position to undertake an investigation or prosecute specific acts, avoiding duplicated efforts and reducing the investigations overhead. Complementary to the tools, a more in-depth focus on the different modes of collaboration among organisations is critical, since understanding organisational differences and establishing good relationships with policing organisations is critical to enhance the mutual trust [16]. In this regard, [141,62,17,18,99,16,15,9] Direct cooperation with service providers and equality of opportunities [123,90,89,122,18,9,59,92,53,52] Incompatibility conflicts between jurisdictions that may violate procedural rights and safeguards [123,94,90,89,74,33,2,1,120,18,135,57,59,13,91,62,16,9,76,92,80,78,…”

“…Complementary to the tools, a more in-depth focus on the different modes of collaboration among organisations is critical, since understanding organisational differences and establishing good relationships with policing organisations is critical to enhance the mutual trust [16]. In this regard, [141,62,17,18,99,16,15,9] Direct cooperation with service providers and equality of opportunities [123,90,89,122,18,9,59,92,53,52] Incompatibility conflicts between jurisdictions that may violate procedural rights and safeguards [123,94,90,89,74,33,2,1,120,18,135,57,59,13,91,62,16,9,76,92,80,78,77] Lack of automated mechanisms to efficiently collect and report requests [90,25,16] Auditability in data collection procedures [123,…”

Federation Based on MQTT for Urban Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Recovery Operations

“…In addition, many of these organisa-1.3 Method of the thesis tions do not let information related to their ICT systems and operational protocols be public. This is due to the safety and security concerns of their organisational protocols [31,32].…”