The implication of Belgium-linked terrorists in the shootings and bombings on November 13, 2015 in Paris — around the Stade de France football stadium, in four pubs and restaurants and the Bataclan... Show moreThe implication of Belgium-linked terrorists in the shootings and bombings on November 13, 2015 in Paris — around the Stade de France football stadium, in four pubs and restaurants and the Bataclan concert hall — became more and more obvious during the police investigation that followed these events. Today we know that the bombings at Brussels Airport and the Maalbeek subway station on March 22, 2016 were committed by the same French-Belgian jihadi network. The consequence has been that many international observers focused on the Belgian police system, wondering why the Belgian police forces had not been able to prevent the radicalisation of these persons. In this paper we examine this question, explaining what happened during the period that preceded these assaults and decoding what the events mean for the Belgian police system today. In other words, this paper doesn’t go into the reaction to radicalisation and the subsequent violence itself, but into the preventive and pro-active actions that had been undertaken earlier to avoid the radicalisation of certain “at-risk” individuals and groups. The main argument we want to develop here is that a targeted prevention agenda was largely present in discourse, but to a great extent absent in practice. Further, we advocate that, if implemented, this kind of preventive approach would have been much more effective than the repressive criminal justice agenda now applied with respect to jihadi terrorism. Show less
This edited collection forms part of a broader, ongoing, research project, ‘The Policing European Metropolises Project’ (‘PEMP’). The Project has its origins in a network of researchers interested... Show moreThis edited collection forms part of a broader, ongoing, research project, ‘The Policing European Metropolises Project’ (‘PEMP’). The Project has its origins in a network of researchers interested in the significance of sub-national policing for understanding processes of convergence and divergence in policing across Europe. The Project commenced in 2013 and reported the findings of its first phase (‘PEMP_1’) in a special issue of the European Journal of Policing Studies (Ponsaers, Edwards et al., 2014). The initial aim of the project was to address the question: ‘To what extent is a local police still present in European metropolises and how is this reality linked with other actors in the security field?’ (Ponsaers, Edwards et al., 2014: 4). This question was defined in relation to current debates in policy discourse and social science about the relationship of sub-national, specifically metropolitan, policing to developments in the European ‘internal security field’ (Bigo & Guild, 2005). This includes developments in supra-national policing policy, including the European Union’s objective of creating a Union-wide ‘Area of Freedom, Security and Justice’ (AFSJ), transnational policing arrangements, such as the Schengen Agreement, and the continued importance of national policing strategies given the variegated historical experiences of European countries, for example those in transition from former Soviet regimes in Eastern and Central Europe or Latin countries in transition from former dictatorship. In questioning any continued ‘local reality’ of policing, the Project seeks to distinguish itself from theories of convergence in European policing as a consequence of, for example, ‘Europeanisation’ (Bigo & Guild, 2005), ‘securitisation’ (Waever, 1995; Hallsworth & Lea, 2011), ‘responsibilisation’ (Garland, 2001), ‘neo-liberalisation’ (Wacquant, 2001) the formation of a ‘transnational state’ (Bowling & Sheptycki, 2012) or the promotion of ‘plural policing’ (Jones & Newburn, 2006). Rather, the Project acknowledges these ‘tendencies’ but seeks to identify their uneven impact and the adaptation of local policing to alleged master narratives of policing change. In turn, this interest in divergence has been stimulated by arguments about the particular importance of metropolises in the constitution of ‘global’ security threats and policing responses. These arguments reflect wider debates in social science about ‘glocalisation’ or the idea that, as a consequence of the greater mobility of capital, labour, goods and services across national borders, it is powerful metropolises or, in the argot of public policy, ‘city-regions’, that become a key focus of comparative social research. They become the principal centres of power through which globalisation is accomplished as they project their political, economic and cultural powers onto other, less powerful, localities, circumventing if not subordinating nation state authorities. This is akin to the concept of an evolving ‘world urban system’ (King, 1997) in which national states represent only one centre of authority within other circuits of power (Clegg, 1989; Edwards et al, this volume). In these terms, certain metropolises become the key nodal points (Castells, 1996) or ‘command centres’ (Sassen, 2001) in more networked and globally integrated social relations whilst other metropolises have to adapt to these forces with minimal protection from national authorities. In a further development of this argument it is suggested that national governing programmes are often subordinated to, and increasingly oriented around, the interests of powerful city-regions (Scott, 2012). A key implication of these broader debates is a need for comparative research capable of understanding the role of metropolitan authorities in driving policing change and whether this role enables a greater diversity in policing policies, generating opportunities for comparing and contrasting rival approaches and their outcomes, or whether the involvement of metropolitan authorities in transnational networks creates tendencies toward policy convergence (Pollitt, 2001). An important corollary of this research aim is to identify the political agency and discretion available to metropolises to define and accomplish their own policing agendas and to question what the role of social science can be in constituting such agendas. However, in pursuing these research aims, it is necessary to address major challenges of translation in cross-cultural analysis: linguistic, conceptual and disciplinary. These challenges can be elaborated through reference to developments in policy and social scientific discourse about public policing in Europe. Show less
It is presumed in the Policing European Metropolises Project (PEMP) that the metropolitan area is an increasingly important object of policing governance, given the transnational challenges... Show moreIt is presumed in the Policing European Metropolises Project (PEMP) that the metropolitan area is an increasingly important object of policing governance, given the transnational challenges encountered by European nation states, including the movement of capital, labour, goods and services enabled by the Treaty on European Union: the ‘Amsterdam Settlement’. In this sense, metropolitan policing is, in part, an artefact of the Amsterdam Settlement and the four freedoms which facilitate mobility across national territories and, in doing so, create new internal security fields. This is a principal insight of the concept of multiple, overlapping, internal security fields introduced in Chapter One of this collection. Illicit, as well as licit, capital, labour, goods and services move from particular localities to others and, especially, to the metropolises in which the markets for these are concentrated. This can be understood as a specific European instance of the broader process of ‘glocalisation’, a concept coined by social scientists to characterise greater transnational mobility and how this privileges certain localities that are able to project their political, economic and cultural power, acting as ‘command points’ (Sassen, 2001; Massey, 2007) in emerging global markets, whilst subordinating those localities that struggle to adapt to these global forces (Swyngedouw, 1997). The basic assumption behind the PEMP is that this process is producing a significant and uneven development of security problems and responses that need to be registered at the level of the metropolis, given that city-regions have different trajectories in the import and export of security problems. Contributors to this edited collection were invited to reflect on the particular significance of metropolitan policing in different nation-state contexts, as registered through reference to particular governing arrangements and policy agendas, in order to test and to adapt this proposition (see Chapter One, this volume). Show less
By including this chapter in the volume we want to avoid that each of the contributors has to explain the broad national policing context and the standing conditions in their chapters, while it is... Show moreBy including this chapter in the volume we want to avoid that each of the contributors has to explain the broad national policing context and the standing conditions in their chapters, while it is precisely the intention to focus on differences in metropolitan policing. In other words, the ambition of this publication is cross-national, even trans-national, comparison. But the endeavour is also intra-national. It was the merit of Wesley Skogan to suggest to compare in each country two or more major cities in one and the same country, trying to discover to what extent policing in these cities differ from each other. The underlying assumption is that differences in policing in metropolises in the same nation-state reflects the elbowroom of metropolitan areas to develop their own policing policy, in spite of one and the same national context. We assume that the reverse is also probable, more precisely that the absence of prominent metropolitan differences in one and the same country mirrors largely the dominance of a national security policy. Therefore it is necessary to include this chapter in the volume. Politics in European metropolises is largely characterized by the competition of power between the nation-state and metropolitan governance. In the majority of European countries the state police are still considered as the formal guardian (or the relic of a vanished age) of sovereignty on the national territory and the visible expression of state power. It seems that European nation-states consider police matters still as their property and that national governments conceive their police system as one of the national symbols of their existence. Police is considered as the visible presence of the state in public space. In this chapter we present a typology of different national police systems, useful for the interpretation of a metropolitan reading of policing realities within different national contexts. Given this general framework, we tried to build this typology on the question of (historical) national dominance or regional autonomy in policing. Show less
In this chapter we analyze the politics of policing, with a specific focus on policing agendas in the two largest cities in The Netherlands: Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Both metropolises are... Show moreIn this chapter we analyze the politics of policing, with a specific focus on policing agendas in the two largest cities in The Netherlands: Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Both metropolises are considered metropolises facing ‘glocal’ challenges related to multicultural populations in urban areas, social inequalities in terms of household income, international harbors, crime and disorder. The term ‘glocal’ refers to the interlinkages between global challenges and local communities. In order to get an understanding of the tendencies towards divergence and convergence in urban policing in the metropolises under study we start with a summary of general trends in policing in the Netherlands in the second section. In the third section national, regional and local governmental constitutional arrangements, discretionary powers and public police management are presented. The remainder of the chapter compares and contrasts policing agendas in Amsterdam and Rotterdam and concludes with an overview of their regimes and possible explanations for convergence and divergence in the politics of policing in these metropolises. The search for the regimes in the background of policing agendas in these two embedded case studies reveals both convergence and divergence towards the national agenda and between the agendas in both metropolises. Possible explanations for these trends could be found in the political ‘circuits of power’ (Devroe, Edwards, Ponsaers, this volume) of the municipal ruling coalition and in wider institutional arrangements in place. Show less
Verschillende Europese landen wijzigen ingrijpend de architectuur van hun nationaal politiebestel. In deze bijdrage ontwerpen we een typologie van deze veranderingen. We doen dat om een beter... Show moreVerschillende Europese landen wijzigen ingrijpend de architectuur van hun nationaal politiebestel. In deze bijdrage ontwerpen we een typologie van deze veranderingen. We doen dat om een beter begrip te krijgen van de groeiende proliferatie in het Europese politielandschap. We ontwerpen een inzichtelijk kader dat gebaseerd is op werkdefinities van essentiële karakteristieken van verschillende nationale politiebestellen. De analyse wordt gevoerd op het niveau van politiebestellen in hun geheel, en niet op het niveau van politiediensten. Omdat deze bijdrage focust op Europa laten we niet-Europese landen buiten beschouwing. Op basis van een diepgaande analyse van de landen Frankrijk, Italië, Portugal, Spanje, Bondsrepubliek Duitsland, Oostenrijk, Zwitserland, België, het Verenigd Koninkrijk, Noord Ierland, Schotland, Zweden, Noorwegen, Finland, Denemarken en Nederland komen we tot een driedelige typologie. Afgezien van de politiebestellen in Oost-Europese nieuwe lidstaten kunnen we in Europa vandaag drie verschillende types van bestellen onderscheiden. Het gaat namelijk om: historisch ontstane politiebestellen, territoriaal ingedeelde politiebestellen en politiebestellen met een eenheidspolitie. De wijze waarop deze verschillende politiestructuren functioneren verschilt aanzienlijk. Voor besluitende commentaren over een specifiek besteltype verwijzen we naar de geformuleerde deelbesluiten bij ieder hoofdstuk. Show less
Deze bundel brengt verslag uit van de tweedaagse conferentie die de Stichting Maatschappij en Veiligheid uit Nederland (SMV) en het Centrum voor Politiestudies uit België (CPS) organiseerden op 12... Show moreDeze bundel brengt verslag uit van de tweedaagse conferentie die de Stichting Maatschappij en Veiligheid uit Nederland (SMV) en het Centrum voor Politiestudies uit België (CPS) organiseerden op 12 en 13 december 2013 in Deinze. De conferentie had als thema "Tides and currents in police theories", waarbij het de bedoeling was te reflecteren over hoe er tegenwoordig wordt gedacht over politie, met andere woorden over de onderliggende stromen en evoluties in politietheorieën. Rond ditzelfde thema werd tevens een Cahier Politiestudies samengesteld dat op de tweedaagse conferentie aan de deelnemers en sprekers werd aangeboden3. Het thema van de conferentie en het Cahier was gebaseerd op een paper van Jack Greene "The Tides and Currents, Eddies and Whirlpools and Riptides of Modern Policing: Connecting Thoughts". Deze paper werd geschreven naar aanleiding van een seminarie dat plaatsvond bij de Universiteit Gent in het kader van de werkgroep "politie" van de European Society of Criminology (ESC) in september 2010. Met deze conferentie wilden we de analyse verder doortrekken en kwamen naast de theoretische inzichten ook de beleidsmatige implicaties ervan aan bod. Met deze publicatie willen we de rijke discussies die zich ontwikkelden ter gelegenheid van deze conferentie onder de aandacht van de geïnteresseerden brengen en continuëren. De publicatie is deels in het Nederlands, deels in het Engels, waarbij we de auteurs vrij lieten de taal van hun voorkeur te hanteren. Show less
Na het arrest van 27 november 2008 van het Europees Hof van de Rechten van de Mens in de zaak Salduz versus Turkije, werden talrijke artikels gepubliceerd over hoe dit arrest moest geïnterpreteerd... Show moreNa het arrest van 27 november 2008 van het Europees Hof van de Rechten van de Mens in de zaak Salduz versus Turkije, werden talrijke artikels gepubliceerd over hoe dit arrest moest geïnterpreteerd worden en of de Belgische wetgeving al dan niet¨aan die rechtspraak moest aangepast worden. Naarmate het EHRM meer rechtspraak produceerde in dezelfde zin als het ‘Salduzarrest’ werd steeds duidelijker dat een wetswijziging zich opdrong. Met de ‘Salduzwet’ van 13 augustus 2011, die van krachtwordt op 1 januari 1012, is deze discussie beëindigd. Dit betekent echter niet dat de discussie over de bijstand van de advocaat bij het politieverhoor nu voorbij is, wel integendeel. De nieuwe wet zorgt voor een van de grootste omwentelingen ooit in ons strafrechtsysteem in het algemeen en voor politionele onderzoeken in strafzaken in het bijzonder. Het gaat immers niet alleen om de verhoren,ook de onderzoeksprocessen van de politie zullen moeten herbekeken worden in functie van de nieuwe rechten die personen krijgen aan wie een misdrijf ten laste kan worden gelegd. Show less
