What powers and objectives do independent police complaints bodies have –compared to other institutions of police control? How familiar is the public with such complaints bodies? What differences and similarities does an international comparison of such institutions reveal?
The research project “Police Accountability: Towards International Standards”, based at Goethe University Frankfurt’s Chair for Criminology and Criminal Law (Prof. Dr. Tobias Singelnstein), among others, compared independent police complaints bodies across five countries: Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom. The results of the three-year project will be presented at the international, public conference on Police Accountability – Practices and Dilemmas of Independent Police Complaints Bodies and Police Control held from June 19–20, 2024 in the “Normative Orders” building, Max Horkheimer Strasse 2, 60323 Frankfurt, Westend Campus.
The event is hosted by the “ConTrust. Trust in Conflict. Political Coexistence under Conditions of Uncertainty” cluster project at Goethe University’s “Normative Orders” research center, and will take place as ConTrust’s fourth Praxisforum.
The results of the interdisciplinary work, in which researchers from the fields of law, criminology, political science, history and sociology were involved, are based on a comparative analysis of more than 200 interviews with key stakeholders across the project countries as well as public surveys conducted in four countries. Speakers include Prof. Dr. Tobias Singelnstein, criminologist and criminal law expert at Goethe University Frankfurt; Prof. Dr. Hartmut Aden, legal and political scientist at the Berlin School of Economics and Law; criminologist Prof. Dr. Marc Alain from the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières; Dr. Genevieve Lennon, lawyer at the University of Strathclyde; Dr. Anja Johansen, historian at the University of Dundee; Germany’s Federal Police Ombudsman Uli Grötsch; as well as Marie Anderson, Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland.
The conference program is available here. You can register to join the public event until June 9, 2024, by sending an e-mail to police.accountability@hwr-berlin.de.
