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Paper short abstract:

This paper is based on fieldwork conducted in the Hellenic Police Officers School and analyses how officer cadets perceive their societal positioning as officers-to-be while they imagine a life of a bureaucrat placed behind a desk and “leaving their gun locked in their desks’ drawers”.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is contextualised by the Greek economic crisis and the first election of the far-right Golden Dawn MPs in the Parliament. The fieldwork took place from 2011-12 in the Hellenic Police Officers School with fourth-year police officer cadets that would graduate and receive the rank of a Police Second Lieutenant in a few months. My interlocutors often discussed how their lives after graduation would change and finally would have only to worry about handing documents at their desks and passing the orders of the higher-ups to the police personnel who are doing the “street-work”. Thus, the paper examines how officer cadets aimed to improve their working and living conditions, have a stable salary during the economic crisis, and stay safe in the police departments, away from any “street work”. Central in their narratives was the elevation of their status as officers and their responsibility. However, through ethnographic examples, I will demonstrate how they cultivate informal skills of avoiding responsibility and decisions during their formal training and placements. Following Michael Herzfeld's thoughts, I argue that the majority of Greek Police Officer Cadets aimed to improve their working and living conditions by becoming “humorless automatons” (1992: 1) that ironically talk about accountability, but they practice indifference through their skills that they develop as highly trained bureaucrats. At the same time, I highlight cases of a few officer cadets who opposed indifference and reclaimed the role of the police officer as a civil servant who often had to contend with their colleagues.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines police unionism in Brazil, India, and the US to better understand some intractable tensions between demands for security and democracy, and to consider how to construct context dependent policies of institutional transformations in policing that will promote equity and justice.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines police unionism in Brazil, India, and the US to better understand some intractable tensions between demands for security and democracy, and to consider how to construct context dependent policies of institutional transformations in policing that will promote equity and justice. Based on data collected through an ongoing collaborative ethnography, as part of the first transnationally coordinated longitudinal study comparing police unionism in the global south and global north, it aims to critically rethink the role of these organizations and movements in political struggles over governance reform. The analysis will focus specifically on how (and whether) members of three different police unions in the listed countries conceive of their mission and activities as “political” movements in the particular context in which they operate. Some claim that they are not political because they do not officially or financially support a specific political party; some question being labeled as such because they focus primarily on things like employment law rather than “issues”; others conceive their work as aligned with revolutionary movements aimed at fighting fascism, or with conservative campaigns to stave off those very movements. Comparing and contrasting different visions of “the political” among actors whose work is often idealized as bureaucratic, impartial, indeed apolitical, we may address questions about the role of police unions, and police officers more generally, in ongoing controversies over whether and how to defund, detask, demilitarize, dismantle, or otherwise transform policing and governance institutions in response to global calls for reform and even abolition.

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Paper short abstract:

What are the implications and unintended consequences of police reform implementation across strategic and operational levels? Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Denmark, this paper explores how police management and police officers navigate a political agenda and how it informs everyday policing.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, there has been a growing tendency in national politics to address perceptions of unsafety and insecurity as principal driving forces of governance. In Denmark, this has resulted in an increasing number of political initiatives aiming to enhance safety and security for the Danish population. This paper explores the implementation of the latest police reform in Denmark – a so-called proximity reform. It outlines how Danish policing has taken a recent turn toward proximity policing as part of a larger decentralization process that aims to enhance safety, police visibility and bring the police closer to the citizens.

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in one Danish police district, this paper unfolds the top-down process of reform implementation across strategic and operational levels. In doing so, it explores negotiations and concerns of reform implementation in police organization and everyday policing, and it unfolds the implications of navigating a political agenda including managerial dilemmas in resource allocation and recruitment as well as disruptions to everyday policing and resistance from local police officers. As a reform that has been advertised as a transformation of the Danish police, this paper further engages with the question of what is perceived as valuable police work across the chain of command and among the public.

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Paper short abstract:

Taking Lebanon as a case study, this paper analyses the effects of community policing' transfer on both the police institution and the agents at the local level. Highlighting the dynamics of appropriation, it sheds light on the authoritarian features of a consensual democracy.

Paper long abstract:

Since the withdrawal of Syrian troops in 2005, the Lebanese security field has been invested by international donors. In order to favour the creation of a democratic police, Lebanese officers were asked to readapt their practices to the standards of “good governance” and among them community policing.

This presentation questions the effects of community policing’ transfer on a fragmented state like Lebanon. Going beyond the neo-institutionalist paradigm, which stresses on the role of institutional blockades to explain the opposition to change, it focuses on the rationales of appropriation of local actors. It combines two levels of analysis: on the one hand, the effects of transfer on the political-administrative apparatuses, on the other, the re-interpretation of these norms by agents in uniform at the local level of Ras Beirut police station.

Various works have shown how the implementation of this exogenous police model reinforces non-democratic structures, while other studies have demonstrated how the growth of neighborhood police has comforted the use of force. This paper aims at highlighting the way in which community policing has become involved in power stakes between various types of actors, thus exacerbating the Lebanese state’s structural divisions. It also sheds light on the authoritarian features of Lebanon: clientelism, abuse of power and participation in crowd policing.

Based on a fieldwork carried out in Beirut between 2015 and 2017, this paper combines an ethnographic inquiry at the Ras Beirut police station and a series of interviews of different actors participating in the transfer of this model. ,