Police Impunity Research Articles

“We're tired of this Weber guy!”—Force experts, police reforms, and the violence of standardization

AbstractSince the mid‐2000s, the use‐of‐force continuum—a global standard for providing law enforcement with guidelines on the proportionate use of force—has been central in Turkish police training and reporting practices. Liberal police accountability tools, like the use‐of‐force continuum, rely on standardization to prevent police violence. Yet these techniques still result in maimed bodies and psyches and police impunity. Rather than taking the standardization of police force simply as a failed project, a sham, or a mere techno‐fix, I examine how powerful actors like police align with such standards and how they start thinking and acting through them while repurposing them. Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork between 2015 and 2017 among the Turkish National Police, I show how the transnational standardization of police force has in fact enabled police in Turkey to redefine and ultimately reclaim the violence they are professionalized in as what I call “force experts.” Force defies standardization in both theory and practice; however, what sanctions police violence now is not just technical standardization but the expert framing of the democratically reformed police force. This is the violence of standardization, especially in contexts where governments retool reforms to criminalize suspect Others whom they perceive as a “threat” to their rule.

Democratic police reform, security sector reform, anti-corruption and spoilers: lessons from Georgia

ABSTRACT The Georgian police reforms of 2004–2006 provide a rare case of rapid, large-scale, successful security reform. Lessons from Georgia challenge mainstream approaches to democratic police reform, security-sector reform, and elements of prominent critiques. These often emphasise democratisation of police and security sectors to include multiple actors in policing and reform. By contrast, the Georgian process was top-down and state-led. Failure to democratise the police has meant the reforms have not curtailed political interference in policing and have only partially reduced police impunity but the reforms vastly reduced corruption, improved security and trust in the police and have been sustained. This was achieved by the government strengthening executive power, consolidating its control over the security sector, firing corrupt police, and cracking down on organised crime. The Georgian case indicates that successful democratic police reform and security-sector reform depend on a concentration of state power to tackle such domestic spoilers and institutionalising before democratising control of the police, factors that are largely absent from policy and academic debates on these topics.

Reasonably Unreasonable: American Use of Force Jurisprudence and Police Impunity

This paper tracks Use of Force jurisprudence from the seminal cases of Graham v. Connor and Tennessee v. Garner to our contemporary moment. I am interested here in assessing the evolving meaning of “reasonableness” over time, especially as it relates to legal mechanisms such as qualified immunity which enable agents of the state to utilize excessive force with impunity. The logic of these cases is contextualized against the contemporary moment of reckoning with the realities of state-sanctioned anti-black violence, something from which a theory of reasonability cannot be cleanly separated.

Witnessing Violence, Witnessing as Violence: Police Torture and Power in Twentieth-Century India

Police custodial violence was a normal occurrence in the southern Indian province of Madras through the twentieth century, across the colonial and postcolonial periods alike. While governmental authorities attributed torture to individual deviants and the press attributed the practice to a lack of government will in punishing offenders, this article locates police impunity in broader structures of power that permeated society. Specifically, it shows how the deployment of seemingly objective forms of evidence in adjudicating cases of torture—the testimony of respectable persons, medical expertise, and police writing—discounted the voices of victims of violence, reaffirming instead policing’s alignment with class, caste, and gendered authority. Equally, the very act of witnessing produced some subjects as socially privileged by virtue of their respectable status, their expertise, or their literacy, further separating them from bodies that were vulnerable to state violence. Police sovereign power within the station was thus constituted in conjunction with disciplinary power across society.

Lessons from the fight against Golden Dawn

The ongoing trial of sixty-eight members of Golden Dawn, a violent neo-Nazi political party in Greece, has been called ‘one of the most important trials in contemporary Greek history’. Based on direct observation and insights from a trip to Athens in September 2019 to observe the trial, which coincided with the sixth anniversary of the murder of the anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas, this article documents the role that activists, lawyers and the families of victims of racist violence have played in bringing members of Golden Dawn to justice. The author examines the trajectory of authoritarian violence inherent in recent Greece history and the culture of police impunity and collusion in racial violence that continues today.

“The Public Does Not Believe the Police Can Police Themselves”: The Mayoral Administration of Harold Washington and the Problem of Police Impunity

The article examines the tenure of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, and his relationship to the Chicago Police Department (CPD). It suggests that while police accountability had been a long-standing goal of Washington and his allies, he failed to sufficiently address the impunity of the CPD once elected. From the outset, the Washington administration exemplified this contradiction by appointing the police department’s first black superintendent, but one who would leave in place a failed structure of a police accountability that made it possible to cover up an ongoing pattern of police torture and coerced confessions. These cases of police torture throw into relief the obstacles faced by this first generation of black mayors who attempted to uproot the institutional underpinnings of police impunity amid the emergence of mass incarceration.

Police Impunity, Human Autonomy, and Jim Crow

The video of police stopping three young black people, two men and a woman, for jaywalking, that ends with the woman screaming in the distance as cops throw her to the ground and twist her arms beh...

The Achilles’ Heel of Police Reforms in Kenya

The genesis of policing in Kenya dates back to the pre-independence times. After independence, the constitution at that time had provisions for the establishment of a neutral police service. However that was just on paper because political leaders turned the police service into a political tool for suppressing and/or repressing political opponents, real or imagined. Thus the police impunity that was there during the colonial era was never eliminated from the service after Kenya got independence. Fifty years later, Kenya is still struggling with reforming its National Police Service which is fettered in many challenges among them corruption within its ranks, extra-judicial killings, limited and/or lack of professionalism, poor housing, lack of modern crime fighting equipments among numerous other challenges. The constitution promulgated in 2010 made demands for structural and welfare reforms to be carried out in the National Police Service. It is worth noting that the reforms anticipated in the police service are now way behind schedule. The culture of impunity in the police service has contributed to too many cases of insecurity, gross violation of human rights, mistrust by citizens and derailment of key achievements in democratic governance. It is thus evident that an overhaul of Kenya’s police service is critical. This paper addresses some of the key challenges facing the National Police Service and gives some policy recommendations.

Every complaint matters: Human Rights Commissioner's opinion concerning independent and effective determination of complaints against the police

Police complaints are a developing area of European human rights law and criminal justice policy. In response to the risk of cultures of police impunity emerging in some European states the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights launched a police complaints initiative in 2008. Written by the consultant to the Commissioner this paper examines his recently published Opinion concerning independent and effective determination of complaints against the police. Firstly, an overview is presented of the different types of complaints mechanism currently operating across Europe. This is followed by an outline of the five police complaints principles developed in the jurisprudence of European Court of Human Rights and explanation of the two-tiered citizen oversight approach advocated in the Commissioner's Opinion. The paper concludes with a discussion of the importance of the principles as a means for ensuring that every police complaint is handled appropriately and proportionately.

Police marginality, racial logics and discrimination in the banlieues of France

Youth in ‘high-risk’ urban zones in France see police discrimination and brutality as a fundamental problem in their relationship to the state, but the state insists on marginalizing or silencing issues of racism and police impunity. At first glance, it seems that mainstream society and its political representatives are indifferent to the racial and ethnic dimension of violence that takes place in marginalized minority neighbourhoods. This paper takes a closer look at how the strength of entrenched French institutions and of police unions play a large roll in institutionalized racism. This paper argues that a lack of institutional accountability within the French culture of governance also helps us to understand why the French national police are so reluctant to embrace the community policing model or to register the persistent histories and geographies of intersecting racial, post-colonial and class hierarchies.

Colonialism, legitimation, and policing in Ghana

Most existing historiographies of colonial and post-colonial policing in Ghana have focused nearly exclusively on providing a basic understanding of managerial issues—that is, organisational and administrative structure, functions and modes of operation. Our knowledge of issues of police legitimation, and of the ‘quality of policing’ remains very limited. This article discusses these issues and establishes the vital importance of history to understanding the contemporary quality of policing in Ghana. Human rights violations, police corruption and police impunity are established as salient characteristics of the police service; these characteristics are traced to the operating philosophy of the former colonial police, and the failure of successive post-colonial governments ideologically to transform the police. Such a transformation is necessary to address and overcome the challenges that are posed by the contemporary liberal-democratic political environment.

Police impunity in Romania: Military jurisdiction over misconduct cases

Monica Macovei, a civil rights lawyer with the Romanian Bar Association, examines both institutional causes of misconduct and existing mechanisms of accountability in Romania in Police Impunity in Romania: Military Jurisdiction Over Misconduct Cases. She focuses her strongest criticism on the role of military courts in investigating and prosecuting criminal wrongdoing by police officers. The monopoly of military courts over such cases, Macovei argues, undermines equality before the law, precludes the independence of judges, threatens the impartiality of prosecutors, and inhibits fair and thorough investigations. She concludes that the police must be accountable to a civilian justice system.