Greek Police Research Articles

Securitization of Greek Terrorism and Arrest of the `Revolutionary Organization November 17'

After 27 years of stalemate and inability to make any progress in dealing with domestic terrorism, in 2002 the Greek police finally arrested members of the `Revolutionary Organization November 17', the most lethal terrorist group ever to operate in Greece. The arrest of the terrorists raised several questions that have not yet been satisfactorily answered. Why did Greece take so long before a decisive strike against domestic, left-wing terrorism was recorded? What were the factors that led to the arrest of the terrorists? In answering these questions it is necessary to analyse not just the operational changes in the Greek counter-terrorist strategy that began to materialize at the turn of the millennium, but also the deep-rooted conceptual changes that led to the inclusion of terrorism in the Greek security agenda for the first time. I utilize and extend the theory of `securitization' as developed by the Copenhagen school, and argue that the state's failure to curtail terrorist activity in Greece resulted from the erroneous belief that terrorism was not a direct threat to Greek security. In turn, the belated securitization of terrorism was the key to the arrest of the terrorists that held Greece hostage for almost three decades.

Greece: policing racist violence in the ‘fenceless vineyard’

Drawing on interviews with Greek detectives carried out by the author in 2002, the Greek police’s attitudes towards migrant communities and racist violence are surveyed. Not only are migrant communities, particularly the Albanian, viewed as hotbeds of crime but racist violence against these communities is not viewed as a signi-ficant problem by the Greek police, who are usually indifferent to racially motivated crimes and often view racist incidents as acts of self-defence by Greeks against the criminal ‘other’. A transformation of such attitudes would require a public recognition of the widespread racism that exists in Greek society.

Citizens’ Safety, Business Trust and Greek Police

This article examines the possibilities for the Greek police to use performance measurement. The article first presents the context from which the monopoly of the state police began to be questioned. It briefly describes the development and essential trends in this type of evaluation for police forces in Great Britain, the initiator of quality reforms in the public sector in Europe and where considerable experience has been accrued. In the second part, the concepts of security and trust are explored and used as the theoretical background for a small-scale empirical study. It examines whether testing the effectiveness of policing can help in developing the necessary sense of security and trust required by small businesses to expand their enterprises. Furthermore, it examines whether such knowledge could motivate security companies to offer a more economic service to a larger number of households and private enterprises by cooperating with the state police and if such measurement would prove useful for them and their customers. Finally, some conclusions are formulated in reference to safety, police culture and organization, as well as to the quality of reform in Greece.

The Political Economy of Greek Policing: Between Neo-Liberalism and the Sovereign State

This article interrogates historical developments, modern structures and future trends in Greek policing from the viewpoint of contemporary neo-liberal policing and social theory. We argue throughout this article that although neo-liberal thinking has indeed recently crept into the rhetoric and logics of Greek governance, the particular social, geographical and political history of the Hellenic Republic has muted these tendencies significantly for policing. Rather than reflecting changes toward post-Keynesian or postmodern policing, Greece (and Greek policing) is confronted by the basic modernist dilemma of ensuring state integrity both physically in the material military security of its borders and vast coastline, and ideologically in the battle for establishing public trust in the efficiency and effectiveness of government. This article analyzes relevant statutes and offers data on the growth of the Greek police and the relatively small private security sector. We conclude that while it is tempting to point to Greece as an exception to the general theoretical maxim that the provision of policing is fragmenting and de-centring as the state is shrinking, there are more and more examples of the recrudescence, re-emergence and continuing central relevance of the state for security provision in other national contexts.

Training People to Inflict Pain

This article examines people-police, soldiers, and others-whose institutional role it is in many societies to follow orders that, they know, will cause pain to others. As horrible as it is, evidence shows that most of these people-from Nazi war criminals and Greek military police serving the Greek junta of the 1970s to Uruguayan psychologist-torturers-were, in fact, "ordinary" individuals inflicting pain to achieve mundane goals of everyday lives. Why did they behave as they did? Milgram's theoretical model of obedience to authority, Bandura's psychological mechanisms to reduce strain, and Altemeyer's theory of right-wing authoritarianism, together, suggest that when individuals who are predisposed to obedience are placed in situations in which they are ordered to commit atrocious acts and in which the strain of committing these acts is systematically reduced through training, the likelihood increases that they will become inflictors of pain. Evidence available throughout the world shows that these psychological principles are part-and-parcel of training of military torturers and that mentally normal people can be successfully trained for this horrendous profession. Altemeyer suggested that certain personality characteristics-fearfulness and self-righteousness-make it easier for one to be trained to inflict pain, by arousing hostile aggression and by developing a belief in moral superiority. Unfortunately, the soldier in the regular army is not immune. Neither is the student.

Agency, Structure, and Explanation in Social History: The Case of the Foundling Home on Kephallenia, Greece, during the 1830s

There has developed recently a body of Self-reflexive literature on the methodologies and epistemological bases of social history (e.g., Zunz 1985; Lloyd 1988; Stearns 1988). Some critics have argued for a greater synthesis between social history and politics (Fox-Genovese and Genovese 1976; Eley and Nield 1980; Hochstadt 1982; Rabb 1981); others have focused more on the mode of social-historical disquisition (Stone 1979); still others have placed especial emphasis on the epistemological basis of historical explanation (Lloyd 1988; Giddens 1978; Abrams 1982). Much of the literature is programmatic. Very few of these works provide concrete examples of how their approaches can be applied. The primary purpose of this article is to furnish a case study that highlights the drawbacks to one type of social history while exemplifying the merits of another. In particular, I want to focus on the nature of the relationship between structure and human agency in social-historical explanation, using as my basis the foundling home established by the British Colonial Office on Kephallenia in 1824. Utilizing the data contained in the foundling register kept by the Greek Police Department at Argostoli over the years 1830 to 1834, I conduct statistical analyses similar to those performed by social historians working on comparable institutions elsewhere and thus place the Kephallenian case into a comparative European context.

Attitudes toward Law Enforcement in Greece and the United States

Attitudes toward law, legal institutions, and law enforcement authorities may indicate a level of criminality. Such attitudes are the internalized residues of critical experiences fed back into the arena of behavior. A pioneer study found that attitudes toward law varied in expected directions with criminal and noncriminal samples in the United States and that a very definite and discernible gradient existed when the attitude inventories of maximum-security prisoners, probationers, labor-union members, and Mormons were compared. Does a similar gradient exist among criterion groups in other countries, based on their as sessed attitudes toward law, law enforcement, and legal institu tions ? After the American research schedule was pretested in Greece, it was administered to a sample of two hundred prison ers, two hundred laborers, and two hundred police officers (known to be the most law-abiding of Greek groups). A gradient was also discernible among the three Greek samples in the expected direction: the prisoners were the most unfavorable in attitude, the laborers favorable, and the police most favorable. The Greek police sample had scores similar to those of the Mormons in the United States. A criminality level index or measure, if it can be refined, would make a very important diagnostic and predictive tool in the field of crime control.

The Anavysos Kouros

Early in August 1937 the fragments of a marble Kouros were conveyed in three packing-cases to the National Museum at Athens from Paris, where Greek police officials had received it from M. Roussos, an antique dealer who had been resident in that city for some time. It was subsequently confirmed that this statue had been smuggled out of Greece by sea a few years ago from Anavysos near Laurion, a district whose sparsely populated coast-line has been for years the scene of a systematic traffic in antiques.