This article is downloaded from www.idunn.no. © 2015 Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for non-commercial use, provided the original author and source are credited. DOI: 10.18261/issn.1894-8693- 2016-02-05 Nightlife Partnership Policing (Dis)trust Building Between Bouncers and the Police in the War on Gangs Thomas Friis Søgaard (Corresponding author), PhD, Assistant Professor Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research, Aarhus University, email: tfs.crf@psy.au.dk Esben Houborg PhD, Associate Professor Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research, Aarhus University, email: eh.crf@psy.au.dk Sébastien Tutenges PhD, Associate Professor Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research, Aarhus University, email: stu.crf@psy.au.dk ABSTRACT This article contributes to the research on trust in policing by examining how private security actors (bouncers) experience the police as a partner in informal policing networks emerging as part of the ‘war on bikers and gangs’ in Danish nightlife. While much international research about partnership policing has employed a police perspective and a top-down approach, thus emphasizing organizational ties between policing bodies, this article uses a bottom-up, interactional approach, with a focus on bouncers’ everyday experiences and understandings of partnerships with the police. Our findings show that the formation of informal police-bouncer networks has significantly increased the degree of police influence in private nightlife environments such as bars and nightclubs. Our findings also indicate that inter-agency trust building is crucial to the collaborative willingness and capability of bouncers. However, collaborative relationships are challenged when the police use coercive tactics in their dealings with bouncers and, also, when there is uncertainty about the partition of roles and responsibilities between bouncers and police. Keywords Partnership policing, bouncers, trust, police, nightlife, gangs INTRODUCTION The ‘Nordic model of policing’ has traditionally been characterized by strong state organization and a reluctance to outsource core policing tasks and to form official partnerships with the private security industry (Høigård, 2011; Kruize, 2005). The organization of Nordic policing however, seems to be undergoing considerable changes due to an increased pluralization of policing (Gundhus, Larsson & Myhrer, 2007) and the growing popularity of partnerships both in Nordic contexts and beyond (Johnston & Shearing, 2003). In Denmark, which is the focus of this article, a recent example of this latter tendency pertains to the PEER REVIEWED ARTICLE Nordisk politiforskning, volume 3, no 2-2016 p. 132–153 ISSN Online: 1894-8693