Conference

EUROPEAN POLICE SCIENCE AND RESEARCH BULLETIN
SPECIAL CONFERENCE EDITION
tool in that regard as it seeks to foster among
human rights activists a better understanding for
the difficult, complex and often even dangerous
character of the police work.
REMAINING CHALLENGES
With all these improvements in mutual respect
and understanding, problems still persist.
CONSTRUCTIVE DIALOGUE
In addition, in many countries police have
realised that they cannot escape public scrutiny.
If they try to do so the public will not trust them
and will be hostile toward them. However, police
are highly dependent on trust of all parts of the
population and their willingness to cooperate
with the police; in the end distrust and hostility are
counterproductive to good and efficient policing.
Thus police have to make the best out of it and use
public scrutiny to gain the trust of the population
and as a means of self-evaluation. Openness to
public scrutiny then also provides room for a
more constructive dialogue with human rights
organisations such as Amnesty International.
Today, constructive dialogue is taking place
in many countries; this can be in public round
tables where specific issues are discussed, or in
bilateral talks that are publicly known, but whose
content may sometimes remain confidential
depending on the agreements made. Amnesty
International also often organises public events,
demonstrations etc. where it is necessary to
engage in dialogue with the police in order
to balance interests of public order and safety
with the right to peaceful assembly and protest.
An example how this took place successfully ( 2 )
demonstrates how apparently opposing interests,
i.e. legitimate security concerns in relation to a
high level State visit (Russian President Vladimir
Putin’s visit to Amsterdam in April 2013) on the one
hand and the right to freedom of expression on
the other — can be successfully reconciled. Open
and trustful discussions about the feasible and the
unfeasible led to a modus operandi where it was
possible for Amnesty International to express its
human rights concerns and that this reached the
addressee of the message, while at the same time
not jeopardising security with demonstrators not
getting too close to the State visit.
SENSITIVE SUBJECTS: ETHNIC PROFILING
Some subjects are particularly sensitive and
difficult to address in a constructive dialogue.
Ethnic profiling is such an example. While
Amnesty International fully accepts profiling as a
legitimate and necessary policing technique; it is
opposed to profiling if the underlying assumptions
are exclusively based on ethnicity, race or other
parameters of visual appearance. Amnesty
International considers such an approach as per
se discriminatory. It is sometimes quite surprising
how passionately many police officers react in
that regard. They seem to perceive this as an
accusation of racism.
However, the intention of Amnesty International
when criticising ethnic profiling is rather to create
an understanding of the impact of this approach
on those who are repeatedly affected by stop and
search practices exclusively motivated by criteria of
appearance. Furthermore, Amnesty International
strongly believes that this technique is also
inefficient and counterproductive. The affected
groups start to feel harassed and discriminated
against as potential criminals and they will lose
trust and confidence in the police. There is thus a
risk of alienating an entire group, and police run
the risk of depriving themselves of an important
source of information when members of these
groups are no longer willing to talk to the police.
Too often, stop and search activities based on
optical parameters without additional objective
criteria will also bind resources for relatively
unsuccessful activities, while more sophisticated,
focused and tested objective criteria might lead
to greater efficiency (higher ‘hit rates’) with less
input of resources ( 3 ); this would also contrast
the problematic consequence of a self-fulfilling
prophecy, in which police will receive ‘evidence’
of their own assumptions of the ‘criminal
character’ of a specific group compared to other
people who will be considered less involved in
criminal activity, only by the fact that they are not
stopped, and consequently never identified as
suspects. And finally, where policing parameters
( 2 ) Available on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH3BNo85Ixo.
( 3 ) See for instance examples presented in Open Society Justice Initiative (2012).
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