Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law

As French riots and many other events have demonstrated, the flashpoints of collective unrest have often been associated with police actions. The relationship between and mutual perceptions of police and (minority) adolescents and the behaviour of police forces in disadvantaged urban areas are therefore essential elements in any analysis of the causes of collective youth unrest. Whereas research on police/minority relations is fairly developed in both France and Germany, there has been almost no comparative French-German research. However, a comparative, cross-national approach is crucially important because it increases the variance of macro-level conditions which may be among the determinants of youth behaviour (social, economic, ethnic conditions), on the one hand, and police behaviour, on the other hand (institutional, organizational, staff composition conditions). If some European countries experience youth riots and others do not, despite the presence of considerable minority populations subject to social disadvantage, the quality of relations between police and (minority) adolescents could be one missing link in the explanation, the varying degrees of social and spatial exclusion could be another. One hypothesis to pursue is that socio-economic disadvantage and spatial segregation are significant forces – at least as important as ethnicity – driving both crime/violence as well as tensions between adolescents and the police (and possibly discriminatory police practices).

Therefore, the focus of the project is twofold: On the one hand, the study centres on the increased ethnic diversity in European cities and its consequences. On the other hand, the project aims to gather empirical evidence on adolescents’ attitudes to and experiences of the police, embedded in an analysis of their social living conditions, expectations and behavioural orientations and on actual police-adolescent interactions, police behaviour and police attitudes towards (minority) adolescents.

Methodically, the research project basically rests on three pillars, incorporating qualitative and quantitative research methods. A quantitative school survey among adolescents nested within neighbourhoods will be paralleled by a qualitative analysis of police behaviour and organizational structure by ways of interviews and field observations. The principal aim of the school survey is to gain standardized information on police-related attitudes and experiences of adolescents for testing hypotheses on key theoretical concepts and for systematic comparisons between ethnic groups, neighbourhood contexts and countries. The qualitative part of the study allows for producing in-depth information on attitudes and interactions between adolescents and the police.

The study is designed in a strictly parallel and comparable way. One mid-sized city and one very large city will be selected in each country in order to increase variance in police activity across the cities and to reduce the risk of national generalization from one point of observation. Within the cities, two disadvantaged and one advantaged neighbourhood each will be selected for the qualitative fieldwork (and also be covered by the quantitative survey).

The results of the study will produce more rigorous answers to a manifest and ongoing social problem and could inform social policies and police strategies in disadvantaged urban areas.

Financing:

The project is funded by a joint research grant from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) (Programme en sciences humaines et sociales 2008).