The Coproduction of Truancy Control

Abstract

Objectives:

To evaluate, under randomized field trial conditions, the deterrent effects of a police–school partnership, called the Ability School Engagement Program (ASEP). The partnership sought to co-produce truancy reduction by actively engaging parents and their truanting children in a group conference dialogue that was designed to increase parental and child awareness of the truancy laws (and the consequences of noncompliance), and thereby foster students’ willingness to attend school.

Methods:

Using a randomized field trial design, 102 truanting young people were randomly allocated to a control, business-as-usual condition (n = 51), or the ASEP experimental condition (n = 51). In this paper, we use mixed model ANOVA and multiple regression analysis of self-report survey data from both students and their parents to assess differences between the experimental and control group on parental perceptions of prosecution likelihood and student willingness to attend school. We use qualitative analysis of the group conference transcripts to examine how the intervention affected these factors.

Results:

Our results demonstrate that the police–school partnership intervention increased parental awareness of prosecution likelihood, which moderated students’ self-reported willingness to attend school.

Conclusions:

We conclude that police–school partnerships that engage parents and their children to better understand the laws pertaining to school attendance are a promising approach for co-producing the reduction of truancy.

Keywords

prevention juvenile delinquency policing partnerships truancy family group conferences third-party policing

Policing school-based crime and delinquency problems has a long history. Up until about 20 years ago, police presence in schools primarily involved visible patrols, education programs, response to calls for service, and investigations of criminal matters (see Raymond 2010). More recently, many schools around the world have added school-based police officers, otherwise known as school resource officers (SROs; see Na and Gottfredson 2013), to the suite of interventions that aim to make schools safer (see Raymond 2010). However, an evaluation by Jackson (2002) found no effects of the SROs on students’ beliefs about the acceptability of offending. Theriot (2009), by contrast, found that SRO programs decreased arrest rates for more serious offenses but increased rates of arrest for disorderly conduct relative to schools without SROs. Na and Gottfredson (2013), using cross-sectional data from over 3,000 schools for the School Survey on Crime and Safety, found that the placement of SROs increased referrals for less serious crimes and increased recording of weapon and drug offenses. Raymond (2010:33) concluded that “…despite the millions of dollars spent to hire, train and implement SRO programs…few reliable outcome evaluations have been conducted.”

For school districts that do not employ dedicated police in schools, or have limited resources for hiring full-time school-based police officers, building proactive partnerships between police, schools, and parents offers an alternative (or parallel) approach to reactive patrols and emergency responses for school-based problems. In general terms, partnerships are argued to coproduce crime control, reducing crime because they increase the capacity of police to tackle crime problems (see Ostrom et al. 1978). Contemporary examples of coproduction are evident in partnerships and multiagency collaborations (see Brewer and Grabosky 2014; Cherney 2004; Crawford 1997; Scott and Goldstein 2005; Sparrow 2016) and the extant literature finds that these collaborative, focused approaches to crime control are more effective than enforcement-only approaches (see Mazerolle, Soole, and Rombouts 2007; Weisburd and Eck 2004).

In the truancy literature, collaborative approaches are assumed to be superior for engaging truanting young people than single-node delivered programs (see Kearney 2008; Teasley 2004). Yet Maynard and colleagues (2013), in their systematic review of school-based interventions, concluded that there was a “…lack of available evidence to support the general belief that collaborative and multi-nodal interventions are more effective than simple, non-collaborative interventions” (p. 17). Thus, in an attempt to fill some of this gap, our article reports the results of a randomized trial that tests the deterrent effects of a police–school partnership program, known as the Ability School Engagement Program (ASEP), that sought to systematically engage parents and their truanting children. The ASEP specifically sought to deter truancy by increasing parental and child awareness of the truancy laws through a collaborative, engaging family group conference (FGC) forum. Increasing awareness of the truancy laws and consequences for noncompliance was theorized to be a key mechanism to increasing a student’s willingness to attend school. Using conference transcripts and self-report survey data of 102 truanting young people and their parents (or guardians) measured at baseline, three months postrandomization and again at six months postrandomization, we explore the impact of the police–school partnership intervention on parental awareness of prosecution likeliness and students’ self-reported willingness to attend school. Our research also discusses whether police–school partnerships that seek to engage parents and children to better understand the consequences of truanting are a promising approach for coproducing the reduction of truancy.

Coproducing Crime Control

The idea of coproducing crime control originated from Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom who, with colleagues, linked an increase in crime rates in Chicago during the 1970s to a move for Chicago police to patrol larger areas in cars rather than on foot in neighborhoods where frequent informal police–citizen information exchanges readily occurred. They observed that the production of public services (e.g., crime reduction) requires the participation of citizens (Ostrom 1973; Ostrom and Ostrom 1977; Parks et al. 1981).

Ostrom and colleagues showed that both the consumption and production of public services required the participation of citizens and that, in the case of policing services, crime control is coproduced when police engage with citizens (Ostrom et al. 1978). Central to the idea of coproduction is recognition that a series of motivations drive coproductive behaviors. These motivations include “…fear of sanctions, material self-interest, intrinsic rewards, sociality and normative appeals” (Alford 2014:304; see also Clary et al. 1998).

In policing, the increasingly complex modern-day marketization of crime control (see Bayley and Shearing 2001) involves multiple partners in coproduction (see McGuire 2006). These partnerships include networks with multiple nodes and multiple linkages involving government, industry, third sector, and community nodes working together to coproduce crime control outcomes (see Alford 2014; Loader 2000). Contemporary coproduction of crime control therefore refers to the processes of police motivating citizens, nonstate actors, and/or other third parties to prevent or control crime problems (see Brewer and Grabosky 2014; Crawford 1997, 2006; Mazerolle and Ransley 2006).

Coproducing crime control features in community policing (Kelling and Moore 1988), problem-oriented policing (Goldstein 1990; Reisig 2010; Scott and Goldstein 2005; Scott and Kirby 2012; Weisburd and Eck 2004), third-party policing (TPP; Mazerolle and Ransley 2005), reassurance policing (Tuffin, Morris, and Poole 2006), pulling levers (Braga and Weisburd 2012), networked policing (Crawford 2006), plural policing (Crawford et al. 2005; Ericson 2007; Jones and Newburn 2006; Loader 2000), and intelligence-led policing (Ratcliffe 2008). Notwithstanding the range of challenges that face multiagency partnerships (see, e.g., Brunson et al. 2015; Criminal Justice Joint Inspection 2014; Rosenbaum 1994; Saunders 2016), across all of these different manifestations of partnership policing, police use a variety of motivators and mechanisms to work with a wide range of partners (including citizens, state, and nonstate entities) to control crime, delinquency, and disorder problems. For example, police forge partnerships with community entities by convincing them to instigate neighborhood-level crime management and emergency preparedness strategies (Fleming 2005; Jackson and Bradford 2009; Safe and Sound 2014), they educate local schools to adopt target hardening tactics to reduce or prevent school vandalism and break-ins (see Johnson 2005), and they persuade justice and social service agencies to take on specific (sometimes new) roles to help them reduce gang violence (Braga, Hureau, and Papachristos 2014; Corsaro and Engel 2015). Police also identify common-ground goals with various city inspectors and businesses as a way to coproduce crime control outcomes. For example, police find natural synergies with fire, safety, liquor licensing, and regulatory inspectors in their efforts to tackle drug-market activity (Dunworth and Mills 1999; Eck and Wartell 1998; Green 1996; Mazerolle, Price, and Roehl 2000). Common-ground goals are also at the heart of many partnerships that tackle gun assault problems. Local community groups and multiagency coalitions of criminal justice agencies are often natural partners for gun violence programs (McGarrell et al. 2006). Other popular partnership approaches include those between police and licensees, local councils, and liquor licensing authorities, where both the police and their partners have common mandates to control alcohol-fueled violence (see Doherty and Roche 2003; Roberts 2004). Synergies also emerge between police and social service agencies to support victims of crime, particularly in response to domestic violence problems (Davis and Taylor 1997; Exum et al. 2014; Messing et al. 2015).

The policing literature is also replete with studies that evaluate these different policing interventions that use partnership approaches to motivate agency partners and citizens to coproduce the reduction, disruption, and prevention of crime, delinquency, and disorder problems. The pulling levers literature, for example, emphasizes partnership approaches where police work within a network of actors, motivating their partners to help them prevent and control crime problems (see Winship and Braga 2006). These networks typically involve a range of potential partners, including criminal justice agencies, community groups, and social service agencies, where police coordinate and combine their efforts to build capacity and magnify their separate crime reduction effects. In their review of the pulling levers evaluation literature, Braga and Weisburd (2012) concluded, with caution, that pulling levers focused deterrence strategies were associated with an overall statistically significant, medium-sized crime reduction effect. The review was unable to discern, however, the mechanisms of the partnerships that led to the crime control outcomes, concluding “…we suspect that the large effects we observe come precisely from the multifaceted ways in which this program influences criminals” (Braga and Weisburd 2012:26).

Articulation of the mechanisms that motivate partners to deter crime and coproduce crime control outcomes is largely absent in the policing literature. In TPP, by contrast, police are theorized to motivate partners through communicating legal responsibilities and the concomitant consequences for noncompliance (see Buerger and Mazerolle 1998; Mazerolle and Ransley 2005; Mazerolle and Roehl 1998; see also Scott and Goldstein 2005). The police explicitly partner with a third party that has a legal provision that is thought to be useful for controlling crime and disorder problems. A third party’s legal levers can be “…statute-based [or] aris[ing] out of subordinate legislation (or delegated legislation, regulations, by-laws, ordinances etc), from a contract, or under tort law” (Mazerolle and Ransley 2005:72). Police-led mobilization of a third party’s legal powers (and concomitant processes) is theorized to increase deterrence of crime, delinquency, and disorder problems by increasing awareness of legal responsibilities, and increasing scrutiny over the way the laws are applied, thereby altering the underlying social, physical, and/or economic conditions that facilitate the problem behavior (Buerger and Mazerolle 1998; Mazerolle and Ransley 2005; Mazerolle and Roehl 1998). In TPP, police can partner with a range of entities (e.g., housing authorities, schools, liquor and gaming licensing authorities, workplace health, and safety) to harness their legal provisions and direct their laws to help police more effectively coproduce the control of crime and disorder problems. The partnerships in TPP are thus attractive to police because the third party’s existing legal provisions can be readily activated or promoted, particularly if they are used in a manner that is mutually beneficial to police and their third-party partners (see Mazerolle 2014).

Garland (2001:17) describes TPP as part of the “new crime control establishment” (see also Shearing 2007): It is relevant to policing in times of fiscal restraint (Ayling, Grabosky, and Shearing 2009; Eck and Eck 2012) and can be effective in reducing a wide range of crime and disorder problems (see Mazerolle and Ransley 2005; Meares 2006). Indeed, an early systematic review and meta-analysis of TPP suggested that activating existing legal structures, provided by the third party’s laws, motivates compliance and is thus a key ingredient that leads to the coproduction of crime control (Mazerolle and Ransley 2005). In the general partnerships literature, structure in partnership-based interventions has been found to be more effective than those partnerships that are unstructured (Berry et al. 2011; Foster-Fishman et al. 2001; Meyer and Mazerolle 2014; Rosenbaum and Schuck 2012; Roussos and Fawcett 2000; Stevenson and Mitchell 2003; Zakocs and Edwards 2006). Clear structures in cross-agency partnerships include good communication and clarity in roles, responsibilities, and procedures.

The Current Study

In the current study, a structured police–school partnership was implemented across 11 schools in one school district in Queensland, Australia. Known as the ASEP, the intervention targeted a school district located within one of the most highly disadvantaged metropolitan areas of Queensland’s capital city, Brisbane: Seven of the 11 schools fell below the average index of Community Socio-educational Advantage, nine schools were deemed Low Socio-economic National Partnership schools, and six schools were rated as falling substantially below the Australian average across a majority of literacy and numeracy domains (see Mazerolle 2014). At the start of the study, nearly 50 percent of families in the catchment communities had no working parent (whereas the Australian average is about 20 percent) and nearly 40 percent of families received welfare benefits (Australian average is 16.8 percent; Australian Bureau of Statistics 2006). The attendance rate for the target schools was below the Queensland state average at the time of the trial. The target school district had a high number of young people involved with the criminal justice system and a disproportionately higher number of burglary, property, and drug-related offenses.

In Queensland, Australia, just 4 percent of schools have a dedicated school-based police officer. By contrast, Na and Gottfredson (2013) report that 21.1 percent of schools in the United States have at least one full-time police officer at the school at least once a week. Thus, in the Queensland context, police and schools needed to explore alternative methods for coproducing truancy reduction. The ASEP operationalized the two key principles of TPP: partnership formation and communication of legal responsibilities. ASEP sought to use a TPP approach to deter young people from truancy, crime, and delinquency by engaging parents and their truanting children in a FGC forum where the school representatives, using the dialogue of procedural justice (see Mazerolle et al. 2012), communicated the legal escalation framework to the truants and their parents.¹ By raising awareness of the laws, the program sought to foster perceptions of the legitimacy of the truancy laws and motivate participants to willingly reengage with school and thereby reduce the incidence of crime and delinquency problems in the sample population (see Mazerolle 2014).

In Queensland, truancy laws are structured as regulatory laws (see Braithwaite 2002) that involve a system of graduated sanctions depicted by Ayres and Braithwaite (1992) and Braithwaite (2006, 2011) as a “regulatory pyramid.” At the base of the pyramid, legal responses entail relatively benign consequences that seek to encourage willing compliance (e.g., educating parents about their responsibilities to send their children to school, schools sending parents warning letters for noncompliance). Thereafter, noncompliance leads to sequentially escalating punitive consequences to coerce compliance (e.g., notices of prosecution), with ultimate sanctions (e.g., parental prosecution) at the peak of the pyramid. In general terms, the responsive regulatory model is argued to foster voluntary compliance by increasing perceptions of the legitimacy of the law, thereby increasing willing compliance so that most escalations do not proceed far beyond the lower levels of the pyramid (see Braithwaite 2011). Beyond the responsive regulation literature, the processes for fostering cooperation and achieving perceived legitimacy of the law are well understood in the criminological literature (see, e.g., Tyler 2003). The process model of policing, for example, shows how procedurally just encounters have powerful effects on citizens’ perceptions of police legitimacy (Mazerolle et al. 2012, 2013; Murphy, Hinds, and Fleming 2008; Reisig, Bratton, and Gertz 2007; Tyler 2003) and citizens’ willingness to cooperate (Bradford 2014; Murphy and Cherney 2012) and comply with police (Hough, Jackson, and Bradford 2013).

In the current study, the program sought to garner voluntary compliance with the truancy laws by engaging parents and their children in a procedurally just manner so that they better understood the laws and the consequences of failing to comply with the laws. As a police-led intervention, the ASEP police officer in the experimental condition worked within a structured partnership with the schools, using the forum of the FGC to communicate the laws and consequences in a procedurally just way. This was different and distinct to the manner in which warning letters and engagement proceeded with parents in the business-as-usual response to truancy. In business as usual, communication of the laws could best be described as officious, with no procedurally just phrases contained in the warning letters or in engagement with the families. In contrast, the experimental intervention (the FGC) used the four key components of procedurally just dialogue: treating people with dignity and respect, conveying trustworthy motives, giving voice to the participants, and being neutral in decision-making (see Mazerolle et al. 2012) as the mode of communication with the parents and truanting young people. The program thus sought to legitimize, prioritize, and build capacity to coproduce and respond to truanting problems. The regulatory legal provisions available to the schools were communicated in a procedurally fair way to engage the parents so that they better understood their responsibilities for their child’s school attendance. Moreover, careful attention was given to creating a structured partnership, with articulated roles and responsibilities and training provided around the preferred, procedurally fair mode of communication. Through this partnership approach, therefore, we expected that parents and their children would better understand the laws and the consequences of noncompliance with the laws and thereby be more motivated and willing to comply with the truancy laws. The procedurally just engagement with the parents and students was thus predicted to foster a greater willingness of the students to comply (i.e., go to school). We used a randomized field trial design to assess this impact of the ASEP police–schools partnership and articulated the following hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1: The experimental group intervention would increase parental awareness of the truancy laws more than the business-as-usual approach for the control group.

Hypothesis 2: The increased parental awareness of the truancy laws would moderate any increase in student willingness to attend school in the experimental group more than in the control group.

Method

Design and Participants

We tested the impact of the ASEP police–schools partnership using a simple randomized field trial. A total of 102 truanting young people² were drawn from 11 target schools in one police district and were randomly allocated to either a control or experimental condition. To ensure that the FGC facilitators’ caseloads were manageable, the trial used a rolling recruitment strategy. Each school term, a small number of cases (students with ≥15 percent unexplained absenteeism) were drawn from each school and school staff approached families to obtain permission for their contact details to be passed on to the research team. Upon receiving this “provisional consent,” families were then approached by project staff to obtain informed consent. After providing informed consent, students and their guardians were then randomly allocated to either the control or the experimental condition.

During the recruitment period, 51 truants and their guardian(s) were randomly allocated to the experimental condition and 51 to the control condition.³ Table 1 provides a summary of the trial recruitment, case flow, and attrition. We achieved a high level of equivalence between the experimental and control conditions with no observed significant differences on preexisting levels of truancy and key demographic variables at baseline (see Mazerolle 2014). To be eligible for inclusion in the trial, students needed to be aged 10–16 years with 85 percent or less attendance in the three previous school terms and have no legitimate explanation for their absences from school (e.g., legitimate medical illness). Participants were recruited between October 2011 and May 2013. Of the 217 families that were assessed as eligible for the trial, 26.27 percent were unreachable (n = 57), 33.18 percent declined participation at the provisional consent stage (n = 72), and 40.55 percent declined participation at the informed consent stage (n = 88, including 11 families that could no longer be reached). Reasons given for declining included that the family did not think the project was suitable for them, the parents reported that they thought their child’s attendance was satisfactory, either the parent or child did not want to be involved, the family reported the child was unwell or the family was moving or did not have time. Most commonly, however, families did not give a reason for refusing (37.50 percent of those declining provisional consent and 30.68 percent of those declining informed consent).

Table 1.

Recruitment, Case Flow, and Attrition.

Eligibility Screened (Total)	319
Eligible: Not recruited	217
Unreachable by school	57
Declined provisional consent	72
Declined informed consent	88
Eligible: Recruited	102
Control	51
Experimental	51
	Experimental		Control
Data Point	Students	Parent	Students	Parent
Completed (baseline) T1 survey	51	51	51	51
Completed family group conference	48	48	—	—
Completed exit meeting	48	48	—	—
Resource pack	2	—	51	—
Completed T2 survey	50	49	49	49
Completed T3 survey	50	50	48	48

Experimental Group Intervention

The experimental condition was coordinated by a dedicated ASEP police officer, allocated to ASEP for a total period of three years. The ASEP officer worked in partnership with the schools and a pool of three trained FGC facilitators for the period of the trial. The intervention proceeded in three stages including the scheduling of a FGC, a six-month period of monitoring and an exit meeting at the end of six months. The FGC forum structured the dialogue of engagement with parents and their truanting children, motivating them to comply with the truancy laws by communicating the legal responsibilities around school attendance and the consequences for nonattendance using procedurally just dialogue.

For every FGC, a uniformed police representative, school representative, parent (or guardian), and the truanting child participated to discuss the legal responsibilities of parents for their child’s school attendance, before escalation of consequences, as deemed lawful under the truancy laws. The format of the conference involved a facilitated, procedurally just discussion of the truanting context, including what happened that led to the student’s truanting behavior, the effects of the truanting behavior (including explicit communication about the legal consequences for noncompliance), an explication of the contributing factors, and then the development and agreement of a child-focused action plan. A specially trained conference facilitator invited the school representative to explain the laws pertaining to truancy, make clear the legal consequences of missing school, and describe the regulatory escalation framework and potentially increasingly punitive actions that could be taken if the truancy continued. An internationally recognized conference trainer adapted the general FGC model (see Barnsdale and Walker 2007; Frost, Abram, and Burgess 2014a, 2014b; McGarrell and Hipple 2007), training the facilitators and school representatives to explicitly describe the legal consequences in the “affect” section of the conference process. The goal was to increase awareness of the laws and encourage both the parents and their children to willingly comply with the school attendance laws.

The ASEP police officer’s role was threefold: first, to work closely with the facilitator and school representatives to bring participants together for the FGC. A pool of three trained conference facilitators was used to conduct the conferences. Second, the ASEP officer was responsible for monitoring the school, parent, and child compliance with the action plan for six months. Third, the ASEP police officer conducted a short exit meeting for the experimental families, scheduled for approximately six months post the group conference. Including the student, an average of 2.75 family members were present at each conference (SD = 0.98, min = 2, max = 7) and the other family members were predominantly the student’s guardian (this included biological parents, stepparents, grandparents, and foster carers). Excluding the conference facilitator and observer (see below), an average of 3.04 professionals participated in the conferences (SD = 0.99, min = 2, max = 6). At least one uniformed police representative and at least one education representative participated in every conference. Twenty-five conferences also included representatives from relevant support agencies (e.g., youth and family support, counseling), including four cases that included a representative from a mentoring service provider, four cases that included a specific mental health support service officer, and 18 conferences with some other type of professional present (most frequently including social workers from youth and family support services). Conferences ran an average of 95.99 minutes (SD = 27.04, min = 50, max = 158 minutes) and were most commonly held at the student’s school (n = 35), followed by a community location (n = 11) and the student’s home (n = 1) or a mixture of the student’s home and the student’s school (n = 1). On average, the dedicated ASEP police officer recorded a mean of 8.89 (SD = 5.82) contacts with the experimental group families during the intervention period.

Control Group Intervention

Given the legislative requirements pertaining to school attendance in Queensland and the SRO presence across the ASEP target district, both the experimental and control cases were delivered the business-as-usual intervention. It was not possible to create a “no intervention” control group or withdraw the legislated school response or SRO exposure from the experimental group. The control condition thus comprised two parts: the business-as-usual school intervention and the business-as-usual SRO exposure. The schools implemented their truancy laws in their usual way, following Department of Education Policies (see Mazerolle 2014). This involved the school principal making ad hoc decisions to initiate formal meetings with the truant’s parent, issue official warning letters via mail (with no procedurally fair language), and (in rare cases) send letters of impending prosecution to the parents of the truanting student. For police, the business-as-usual response included normal SROs’ exposure. Across the entire state (population size approximately 4 million people), 70 of the 1,723 schools (4 percent) have dedicated SROs whose role is to deliver classroom seminars and attend to police-related matters within the school community where appropriate. The dedicated SROs also deliver seminars and services to nearby schools. As such, we know that SROs offered a relatively low level of presence in each of the ASEP target schools, delivering classroom seminars about crime prevention and attending, when they had capacity, to police-related matters. The SROs did not deliver any type of conference or family meeting that resembled the FGC, monitoring, or exit interviews of the ASEP. At the point of random assignment, families in the control condition received a resource pack containing preexisting community information leaflets/resource lists.

Monitoring Treatment Fidelity

During the period of the trial, ASEP staff monitored treatment fidelity, ensuring that no control group participants (or their siblings, guardians or other family members) participated in any of the three component parts of the experimental intervention. Our monitoring was facilitated by having school staff member(s) dedicated to the university ASEP research team for a period of three years. The ASEP school staff member worked alongside the university project staff to monitor the activities of schools pertaining to truancy, ensuring that the 11 schools and the SROs in the ASEP target schools did not introduce any aspect of the experimental condition, including no FGC, monitoring, or exit meeting for the control cases. University research staff also monitored the integrity of the experimental treatment by observing each FGC and exit meeting and recording all ASEP police officer activities on a daily activity log and meeting on a weekly basis with the conference facilitators.

FGC Transcripts

Each FGC completed for the experimental group (n = 48)⁴ was voice recorded by observers (sitting outside the conference circle), who also completed a standardized observation instrument. Voice recordings were transcribed verbatim and the recording and transcriptions were then stored on a secure network. We conducted a manual thematic analysis using the six-phase method devised by Braun and Clarke (2006). As part of this process, descriptive codes representing features of the conferences were generated (Saldana 2013) and then collated to form overall conference themes. Following this, we extracted excerpts that were representative of each theme from the conference transcripts. In this article, we focus on the three primary themes that are relevant to the two research hypotheses: deterrence from skipping school, understanding of the law, and the value of education.

Survey Data

We collected baseline survey data (T1) and two subsequent⁵ follow-up surveys with young people and their responsible parent at approximately three months (T2) and six months (T3) postrandom assignment. In this article, we examine the impact of the police–schools partnership program on parental awareness of the truancy laws and the students’ willingness to attend school. Each recruited student and their parent(s) completed a baseline survey prior to randomization. T2 surveys were completed by experimental participants approximately three weeks after the group conference and by control participants about three months postrandom assignment. T3 surveys were scheduled to take place approximately six months postrandom assignment for the control group and after the exit meeting (approximately six to nine months postrandom assignment) for the experimental group. Surveys were completed in convenient locations for the families (typically either at their home or in an administrative room at the student’s school) in the presence of two trained researchers. Participants also had the option to have the survey questions read to them and their answers recorded by the researchers. Baseline (T1) surveys typically took approximately an hour to complete, with T2 and T3 surveys taking approximately 30 minutes. On average, student participants completed the T2 survey 5.04 months (SD = 2.49 months, min = 2.73 months, max = 16.59 months) and T3 survey 9.88 months (SD = 3.19 months, min = 5.58 months, max = 18.83 months) after random allocation.

Measures

At both baseline (T1) and T2, parents were asked about their perceptions of the likelihood of prosecution for students’ nonattendance (rated on a 5-point Likert-type scale from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree). A scale was created using the average response of two items: “Parents are rarely prosecuted and fined if their child does not go to school (reversed)” and “I won’t be prosecuted and fined if my child does not go back to school (reversed).” At T3, student participants were asked how their willingness to go to school had changed following the intervention (rated on a 5-point Likert-type scale from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree). Items were slightly varied in their wording based on the participants’ condition, asking “Since the conference/since being involved in the project, I have tried to go to school more often.”

Results

Perceptions of the Likelihood of Prosecution

The police–schools partnership sought to motivate parents and their truanting children to willingly reengage with school by implementing a structured, procedurally just and collaborative conference forum to engage and communicate with the parents about their legal responsibilities for getting their children to attend school. In the context of the conference, the school representative communicated to the parents their legal obligations and then encouraged the parents and young people to willingly comply with the law and not risk prosecution. To explore the impact of the intervention on parental understandings of prosecution likelihood, we conducted a 2 (time: baseline [T1], follow-up 1 [T2]) × 2 (condition: experimental, control) mixed model analysis of variance. The results indicated a significant main effect of time, F(1, 87) = 5.534, p = .021, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .060, and condition, F(1, 87) = 4.248, p = .042, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .047, but no significant interaction between time and condition, F(1, 87) = 0.853, p = .358, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .010, on perceptions of prosecution likelihood for students’ nonattendance. In investigating these effects, we found no significant effects of condition at baseline (i.e., experimental and control perceptions were equivalent at T1, F(1, 87) = 0.881, p = .350, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .010). There was, however, a significant effect over time for experimental participants, F(1, 87) = 5.191, p = .025, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .056, but for not control participants, F(1, 87) = 1.057, p = .307, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .012 (see Figure 1). For experimental participants, there was a significant increase in parents’ awareness of the truancy laws and perceptions of prosecution likelihood from baseline/T1 (M = 2.977, SE = .132) to T2 (M = 3.326, SE = .110), while control participants over the same period did not significantly differ. Put another way, we found support for our first hypothesis that the experimental intervention made the parents more aware of their legal responsibilities for ensuring their children attend school (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Perceptions of prosecution likelihood at baseline (T1) and follow-up 1 (T2) for experimental and control adults.

Willingness to Go to School

In our second hypothesis, we explored whether there was a moderating effect of the intervention where raising parental awareness of their legal responsibilities would result in parents being more willing to comply with the law, which would then increase the likelihood of young people attending school. We assessed, therefore, whether the T3 student perceptions of their willingness to attend school were moderated by parents’ attitudes toward prosecution for their child’s truanting behavior (their perceptions of prosecution likelihood).

We conducted a moderated multiple regression using the PROCESS macro for SPSS version 26 (see Hayes 2013) to examine the impact of adults’ perceptions of prosecution likelihood (mean centered at T2) on their child’s (i.e., the student’s) self-reported attempt to try to go to school more often (at T3), moderated by the intervention condition. The model was significant, R ² = .141, F(3, 86) = 4.718, p = .004, with the intervention condition (b = 0.645, SE = .207, p = .002) and the interaction between intervention and prosecution likelihood perceptions (b = 0.565, SE = .296, p = .060), but not prosecution likelihood perceptions (b = −0.313, SE = .224, p = .165), significantly predicting students’ reports of trying to go to school.

In support of our second hypothesis, Figure 2 shows that the experimental intervention predicts a student’s efforts to go to school when their parents are at or above the mean ratings for the likelihood of prosecution (−1 SD: b = 0.256, SE = .289, p = .387; M: b = 0.656, SE = .207, p = .002; +1 SD: b = 1.057, SE = .301, p < .001). That is, the experimental intervention increased students’ efforts to go to school when the parents believed that prosecution for nonattendance was likely. This result supports our second hypothesis.

Figure 2.

Effect of adults’ perceptions of prosecution likelihood on their students’ attempts to go to school more often, moderated by intervention condition.

Conference Transcripts

To better understand the way that the intervention increased parental and child awareness of prosecution likelihood for noncompliance and how this affected the child’s willingness to go to school, we also conducted a thematic analysis of the conference transcripts. In this section, we present excerpts from the analysis that represent three conference themes: deterrence from skipping school, understanding of the law, and the value of education.

In case AB013, the police representative in the conference asked the young person (YP013), how she felt knowing that her mother could be fined. At the time of the conference, AB013 was 14 years old and in grade 10 at school. She lived with her mother and older brother, who both had a criminal history, and often missed school to attend her brother’s court appearances or visit him in prison or because she was too tired to go to school. In this FGC, the mother expressed how stressed and frightened she was about the legal consequences. The young person participated in the conversation as follows:

YP013:

I felt terrible actually. Because she shouldn’t have to like occupy me and suffer for me not doing something that’s so simple.

Police013:

So now that you’re going to school and want to go to school, that has boosted your confidence and helped Mum? And that makes you—how does that make you feel?

YP013:

It feels good.

Police013:

And makes you want to keep on going?

YP013:

Yep

(Transcript AB013, p. 31)

Similarly, in case AB035, considerable discussion took place about the legal levers. AB035 was 15 years old at the conference and about to go into grade 11 at school. He resided with his parents and siblings (a large family with five children) and was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. In this example, the mother and child explain how the conference process has generated a better understanding of the truancy the laws:

Mother035:

We know, like we’ve explained it to him, over and over and over again, not quite as good as you’ve just explained it, but we’ve explained it, we’ve told him we’ll get fined we’ll go to jail we’ll go to court, we’ve told him.

Facilitator035:

How do you feel when you hear that, for your mum and dad?

YP035:

Um….

Mother035:

I’ve told him if I go to jail I’ll come back out and kick his butt. [she laughs]

Facilitator035:

Did you think maybe they might’ve like I’m wondering if hearing it from the school, do you think that maybe because sometimes we can hear Mum and Dad and maybe don’t always listen I’m just wondering hearing it from School Representative 035, does that make a difference?

YP035:

Yes.

School035:

Why does it make a difference, hearing it from me rather than hearing it from Mum and Dad?

YP035:

I don’t know, it’s more…[he can’t seem to find the word so he’s helped out]

Mother035:

Official.

YP035:

Yeah.

Mother035:

I don’t think he really believed us.

School035:

This really is serious, YP035.

YP035:

Yep.

(Transcript AB035, pp.19-20)

In case AB054, the mother had shown the young person the warning notice she had been given previously about his attendance. AB054 was 13 and in grade 8, residing with his mother (who worked at a local primary school) and his sister. This next passage illustrates how procedurally fair communication around the truancy laws is likely to elicit a much better outcome—in terms of truanting young people willingly reengaging with school—than the business-as-usual approach.

Mother054:

and we had a formal meeting, with a formal letter [somebody’s agreeing] and I just scared the bejeebas out of him and I showed him the letter I didn’t tell him about it I just said read this, this is the consequences, I can get fined, which means that you know I’ll have to work more or you know, do something else, you’ll lose things, eventually you could be taken off me if the police and the school see that I can’t get you to school, they’ll put you somewhere where somebody will get you to school.

YP054:

[unclear] Boarding school.

Mother054:

Yes. Yes I emailed myself letters, from authorities, showed him, boarding schools, I did everything. Yeah it was purely scare tactics.

Facilitator054:

So there was that, there was Mother054 coming and picking up YP054, anything else YP054? Because you’ve said, I heard you say well it wasn’t just that was there anything else or was it just what Mum’s added.

YP054:

I don’t want my mum to get blamed because I didn’t go to school because it wasn’t her fault. It is mine.

(Transcript AB054, pp. 14-15)

These sentiments were echoed in case AB092. AB092 was 10 years old and in grade 5 at the time of the conference, living with her mother and younger sister. She often missed school because of social problems, telling her mother she was sick.

Facilitator092:

Did you know there was a legal consequence about going to school?

YP092:

Well mum has said that sometimes, so…I didn’t realise that it was this bad.

Facilitator092:

What do you think about that now that you know that?

YP092:

That I’ll, well like, when I’m, when mum says ‘you’re not that sick, you can go to school,’ I’ll go to school so that I don’t get in bigger trouble. And that when I’m really really sick, but I think that I can manage school, I’ll tell mum so I don’t get in bigger trouble.

(Transcript AB092, p. 7)

Discussion and Conclusion

In a time of increasing tensions around school security (see Robers et al. 2015), the effectiveness of police in schools or police partnering with schools to reduce truancy and provide greater safety in schools is an important research and policy issue. This article reports results from the ASEP: a police–school partnership program, implemented under randomized field trial conditions, to assess whether a collaborative approach could coproduce two specific outcomes: increased parental awareness of their legal responsibilities and, subsequently, increased student willingness to attend school. In support of our hypotheses, we found that ASEP increased parental awareness of prosecution likelihood and that this increased awareness facilitated young people’s willingness to attend school.

Consistent with the ideas of coproduction, we theorized that the partnership approach needed a clear, common goal—in this case, the mutual desire to reduce truancy—and a clear motivator to drive coproductive behaviors. In the general coproduction literature, motivations can include “…fear of sanctions, material self-interest, intrinsic rewards, sociality and normative appeals” (Alford 2014:304). In this current study, we operationalized the theory of TPP (see Mazerolle 2014) and used a procedurally fair conference format to motivate the parents and their truanting children to reengage with attending school by communicating to them their legal responsibilities and the consequences for noncompliance.

The ASEP police–school partnership approach described in this article used truancy legal provisions that were particularly well suited to fostering a willingness to comply with the school attendance laws. With the laws structured along the lines of the Ayres and Braithwaite (1992) regulatory pyramid, the Queensland truancy laws offered schools and police the legal capacity to gain willing compliance at the bottom of the regulatory pyramid. Other truancy laws may not be structured in this way. Many different types of truancy laws, regulations, and civil remedies exist across four general sources of authority for civil remedies (statute, subordinate legislation, contract, and tort). How parents and young people might react to the different processes of different truancy laws within a group conference setting is unknown (Mazerolle and Roehl 1998; Smith and Mazerolle 2013). Smith and Mazerolle (2013), for example, identified the myriad of municipal ordinances, codes, or bylaws that regulate the uses of property, particularly around construction, protection against fire, and other types of safety hazards. These are the types of laws that police, in partnership with their third party, can activate and use for crime control purposes. Yet activating third-party legal provisions that do not offer the capacity of the partnership to gain willing compliance before escalating the consequences creates the potential for the intervention to backfire (see Desmond and Valdez 2013; Mazerolle and Ransley 2006; Meares 2006).

Unlike many of the activities undertaken by police in schools that are enumerated in the extant literature (see Na and Gottfredson 2013; Raymond 2010; Theriot 2009), the police–school partnership approach described in this article exemplifies many of the key characteristics of successful coproduction of crime control: the ASEP started from a place of common-ground goals (see Mazerolle 2014), the intervention increased the capacity of parents to understand their responsibilities for their child’s school attendance, and the approach motivated young people to willingly engage more in school. Our results are thus consistent with a great deal of evidence supporting the effectiveness of coproducing crime control and partnership approaches for addressing crime and disorder (see Berry et al. 2011, for a review; Braga et al. 2014; Corsaro and Engel 2015; Dunworth and Mills 1999; Eck and Wartell 1998; Fleming 2005; Green 1996; Johnson 2005; O’Neill and McCarthy 2014; see also Mazerolle et al. 2007, for a review; McGarrell et al. 2006). The literature suggests that partnerships in policing are effective for reducing crime because they create greater capacity than what the police might be able to accomplish alone. While we recognize the many challenges with multiagency partnership approaches to crime control and prevention (see, e.g., Brunson et al. 2015; Criminal Justice Joint Inspection 2014; Rosenbaum 1994; Saunders 2016), Rosenbaum (2002) suggests that partnerships increase the capacity of police and their partners to target criminogenic risk factors in a multifaceted manner (see also Cherney 2008; Rosenbaum and Schuck 2012). Similarly, Bond and Gittell (2010:119) suggest that multiagency partnerships with clear lines of responsibility can coproduce positive outcomes by facilitating coordination through “…frequent high-quality communication supported by relationships of shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect” (see also Gittell 2006, 2011; Gittell et al. 2000, 2008). The review by Berry and colleagues (2011) similarly suggests that strong leadership, data sharing, communication, flexible structures, and the experience of working collaboratively all contribute to successful partnerships. Implementation of ASEP sought to operationalize these successful components of multiagency partnerships. The ASEP trial required the commitment of time and resources by schools and police to increase the capacity to address truancy. Even with a shared goal (in the ASEP case, truancy reduction), partnerships can be inherently difficult in a context of resource constraints and sometimes incongruent remits and organization structures. Consistent with Gittell’s multiagency partnership research, fostering an ongoing partnership to effectively engage with at-risk families during the ASEP trial and evaluation required planning, information sharing, regular communication, a willingness to be flexible, but also to abide by the structured intervention and evaluation model.

Mazerolle and colleagues (see Buerger and Mazerolle 1998; Mazerolle and Ransley 2006) argue that police partnerships (or multiagency partnerships led by police) can be effective in controlling crime problems when the partners possess clear legal provisions that can be activated, used, or tailored to prevent or control crime. In TPP, the partner’s legal lever is hypothesized as a key ingredient that defines the roles and responsibilities of the parties, structuring the response to a problem. What we find in this current study is that careful communication of the school’s legal lever to the parents and truanting children in the context of a police-led, collaborative partnership can motivate actors to coproduce crime control benefits.

In an era of decreasing police budgets (Neyroud 2015) and increasing pressure on police to cope with a wide range of complex problems, the collaborative partnership approach to policing schools offers a relatively simple and sustainable option. Consistent with research that expounds the “fragmented, diverse, networked policing” approach (Loader 2000:324; see also Crawford 2006), we recognize the wide array of ways that police seek partnership approaches for dealing with the increasing complexity of crime problems in modern society. Crawford (1998) enumerates, for example, the multiple roles of the public police under the U.K. Crime and Disorder Act 1998, which places statutory responsibility on police and local authorities to forge partnership with agencies (e.g., health and probation services) in order to come up with local crime reduction strategies. Loader (2000) too considers the range of partnership opportunities for policing through government (such as private patrols used to police public housing sites), below government (e.g., organized surveillance groups such as neighborhood watch), above government (e.g., new forms of international police partnerships and cooperation), and beyond government (e.g., “in-house” security staff). Given that the vast majority of schools across Australia, and to a lesser extent across the United States, do not host a school-based police officer, the ASEP-like partnership approach holds some promise as a policy option for schools dealing with truancy, crime, and safety problems.

Footnotes

Authors’ Note

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors. Responsibility for any errors of omission or commission remains with the authors.

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship (2010 to 2015; grant number FL100100014) that funded the experimental evaluation of the police–schools partnership program. We also acknowledge the ongoing support from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course. As with any large-scale trial, the work that is presented in this article is made possible by the dedication, passion, and professionalism of a large number of very special people. We are, therefore, indebted to the project team at the University of Queensland (Tanya White, Emina Prguda, Adele Somerville, and Amelia Grey), our PhD students (Amanda Acutt, Kate Leslie, Agnieszka Sobolewska, and Laura Bedford), as well as the dedicated operational team from the Queensland Police Service (especially Corey Lane, Tonya Carew, Gregg Chapman, Andrew Gillies, and Peter Conroy), the Department of Education (especially Peter Blatch, John Dungan, Karen Barnett, Tony Smith, Glyn Davies, Ian Hill, and the staff, students, and families from the 11 schools participating in the trial), and the facilitating team drawn from the Department of Justice and Attorney General (especially Claire Walker, Wayne Seeto, Veronica Moggs, and Kelli Byrne).

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship (2010 to 2015; grant number FL100100014) funded the experimental evaluation of the police–schools partnership program.

Notes

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