The major premise of third party policing is that police on their own cannot succeed in reducing many crime and disorder problems. Instead, they need to draw on the social control mechanisms held by other government and community actors. Third party policing occurs when police leverage the powers or legal levers held by those other actors or partners to help control or reduce crime or disorder. The move for police to work through partners has accelerated due to trends in governance, the increasing scope of government regulation, and the expectation that communities will help co-produce public safety. At a time when many police agencies face budget restrictions, encouraging others to assume some crime control responsibility becomes especially important. These trends have expanded how crime can be regulated and prevented in ways that do not rest only on traditional criminal law or justice processes. Typical police partners include regulators, businesses, property owners, and schools. Legal levers include property or fire codes, liquor regulation, rental contracts, and school suspension or discipline powers. Police seek to activate or escalate their partners’ use of these non-criminal powers, either cooperatively or coercively, so as to extend the range of policing influence over problem places, people, or situations. Therefore, third party policing is both proactive, in that it is focused on addressing and reducing the causes of crime and disorder, and problem-oriented, in that it seeks to do so by analyzing and resolving recurrent, underlying problems. The focus on places, people, and situations also aligns with situational crime prevention techniques, such as hots spots policing and focused deterrence. But third party policing is differentiated from these other approaches through its reliance on the legal levers of partners. The first section in this entry outlines how third party policing has developed over the past twenty years. There are also sections on the role and use of regulation in policing, the contribution of civil remedies to crime prevention, descriptions of the multiple contexts in which third party policing has been adopted, factors that promote successful partnerships, assessments of outcomes and effectiveness, and issues to do with ethics and accountability.
