Recent literature on police partnership working has challenged the orthodoxy established during the
1980s and 1990s that this is an unpopular area of police activity. Instead, recent research suggests
that partnership working can reinforce and enhance the policing value of pragmatism (O’Neill and
McCarthy, 2014), due to its focused and bottom-up approach to problem solving. Using a casestudy
approach to investigate a co-located partnership group tasked with reducing demands for
policing services, I explore the precise nature of the processes that enable these apparently effective
elements of partnership working to emerge. I suggest a core role for “authority work” defined as
the process through which particular interpretations of people, events and outcomes are warranted
and rendered legitimate. I use the insights generated from the analysis to reflect on why partnership
working may sometimes succeed in both producing successful multi-agency collaboration and what
such success might mean for those individuals that are the targets of partnership interventions.