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EUROPEAN POLICE SCIENCE AND RESEARCH BULLETIN SPECIAL CONFERENCE EDITION conference with interested individuals and the wider public as far as possible. Recordings of the spoken presentations and files of presentation slides are available either from the public CEPOL website ( 1 ) or from the CEPOL extranet, depending on technical circumstances, delivery and permission given by the authors. The organisers approached also the speakers about the delivery of a full paper for a publication of the conference proceedings a posteriori, resulting in the publication at hand ( 2 ), featuring nineteen delivered and editorially accepted papers. THE CONTRIBUTIONS Few of the presentations are actually addressing the impacts or effects of economic constraints on police or training directly. Instead, the majority deals rather with the epiphenomena – either as empirically detectable negative influences on police performance, ethics or public trust, or as encouragement to rethink policing and innovating the way how it is organised or done. While there is variously differing emphasis on the reasons, causes and perspectives to be applied appropriately, there seems to be one universal assessment to be shared by everyone involved: that there has been a significant shift in conditions and circumstances how policing has to be organised and executed in the democratic societies of the European continent. As so often in conferences that try to build bridges between different experiences and professions, there are those who try to enhance common understanding by applying sharp analytical tools to the area of concern at hand, and those stressing new opportunities and possible solutions. In the keynote of the conference, James Sheptycki, a Canadian scholar with large empirical experience of policing studies in Europe, offered what he termed a “Constabulary Ethic”, not as a full solution to the dilemmas police officers see themselves confronted within their spot of a transnationalised, tensioned and torn world of conflicts and crime, but as personalised professional fundament, on which actions and activities of “good policing” can rest and built upon. The paper, co-written with UK-based Ben Bowling, makes a start from a number of empirical observations that was also stated earlier as relevant for the development of a European police science (Jascke et al. 2007): policing has become increasingly transnational and has expanded into the global; legitimacy is a crucial factor for successful policing, not just in democratic societies; policing is not monolithic – it is concerned with different priorities and performed by a multitude of societally organised actors, dissolving into various subcultures. From their view that “…under transnational conditions (…) policing practice has transcended the boundaries of ‘the state’” they perceive a risk of iatrogenesis, a case of falling for a securityparadox, “where the proscribed cure for an illness actually makes matters worse”. Instead their plea is for an emphasis on reflexive thinking within the police profession, aiming towards the “development of an ethical standpoint”. If it is a standpoint or a conceptual point of is not entirely clear, but Sheptycki and Bowling seem to consider it as well as an imperative on the system level of global policing, but also as a rather personalised attitude of the individual officers, guiding their daily practice. Several of the papers presented at the conference dealt with the nexus between the sometime volatile relationship between citizens and the police, where, under conditions of increasing economic constraints, conflicts can rise more easily, putting the trust in the police as a functional element of the state at stake. The tricky problems coming along with an attractive idea of “good governance” or good police behaviour on the officer level, are exemplified and discussed in the contribution of Christian Mouhanna, Director of the Center for Sociological Research on Law and Criminal Justice Institutions (CESDIP) in France on the perils of rigidity in encounters of citizens with law enforcement. With a key reference to sociological classic Max Weber and underlined by empirical observations, Mouhanna illustrates the potential dilemma police officers on the streets regularly get caught into, when they have to individually balance partly contradictory expectations from their superiors citing legal rules and regulations and members of the public, who require police protection from harm, but ( 1 ) https://www.cepol.europa.eu/science-research/conferences/2013 ( 2 ) The unfortunate delay in publishing this special conference issue of the Bulletin is the sole responsibility of CEPOL and the author of these lines, while the college had been challenged by an extraordinary organisational change dynamic. 4
EUROPEAN POLICE SCIENCE AND RESEARCH BULLETIN SPECIAL CONFERENCE EDITION also seek leniency and understanding when they themselves are under scrutiny. In this perspective the irrefutable requirements of governance by regulation paradoxically undermine the street performance of the police officers, which it is meant to increase. Trusting that the police do their job in a fair and right way, not at least from a citizen protester’s perspective, is also the core theme of David Waddington’s case study of ‚softer’ tactics of policing political protest in South Yorkshire, UK. In his essay he traces dialogue-based police tactics that recently surfaced in Europe, like the Swedish inspired GODIAC project, back to concepts that were already applied in metropolitan London 20 years ago and describes in detail how this approach unfolds in practice. While he recognises the positive results in form of a bigger chance for civilised encounter between protesters and police forces and the building of rapport in the long-term, he stresses that the (mutual) trust goes only so far and that those tactics are not appreciated from all sections of the police force, where some favour still a more traditional robust approach. The robust side of policing and its meaning for the contemporary self-understanding and training of police professionals is as well the topic of Rafael Behr’s contribution from Germany, a turned into teaching academic former operational police officer. Relating to a public debate in Germany on violence against the police, he aims at an enhanced understanding of violent police-citizen encounters by examining the interpretative dynamics on both sides. His hypothesis is that the probability of violence increases, triggered by a growing estrangement between the police and marginalised parts of the society, where especially younger police officers are not equipped with sufficient knowledge about using alternatives to force, when dealing with people in social or economic poverty. Admitting that a sound empirical base to underpin his hypothesis is still to be found, he calls for scientific examination to steer public debates away from the risks of hysteria and hype. In democratic societies, where the rule of law prevails and the respect for fundamental human rights is enshrined in legislative as well as in executive practices, citizen’s suffering from unjustified police violence or misconduct will be given recourse to legal remedies. The analysis of the development of police complaint procedures in England and Wales by Dermot Walsh provides little optimism that those instruments are fully fit to instil confidence of the concerned public in the soundness and functioning of a balanced policing system, as he identifies five structural weaknesses in addressing individual legal cases. One could understand the existence and work of Amnesty International as an institutionalised response of civil society insisting on good, human-rights compliant, non-discriminatory policing. Anja Bienert from the Dutch AI section describes in her contribution the progress that has been made in dialogue with police authorities so far, while highlighting areas in further need of improvement. An encouraging positive example, how a wellconsidered police training programme can underpin the formation of a positive relationship to populations at the fringe of established societies is delivered by the description of a community policing approach for Roma communities in Slovenia. Branko Lobnikar demonstrates how the introduction of special training programme on “policing in a multi-ethnic community” at police academy reaped benefits by significantly increasing the trust in proper police conduct and police procedures among influential members of the Roma community. The significance of trust - and its strong connection with perceived legitimacy of both police actions as well as police procedure systems - has been the central analytical focus of three contributions: • For a comparative analysis among eight countries in Central Eastern Europe, Gorazd Meško, Chuck Fields, Jerneja Šifrer and Katja Eman issued a web-questionnaire to a sample of law-students, inquiring about their perception of police authority and procedural justice, applying various statistical analysis methods to the outcomes. • Restricted to Germany, but based on a much broader population sample, Mai Sato, Rita Haverkamp and Mike Hough looked into the reasons, why trust in the police and police procedures are higher in Germany, compared to the European average data set. Interestingly, they found that there were no significant differences between ‘native’ Germans and those respondents with a migration background. 5
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