On 8 April 2016, two local police officers in Oradea fined a woman and her mother for leaving household waste beside the wrong bin. Within hours, the incident had left the street and entered a Facebook group with more than 24,000 members. Nine years later, the European Court of Human Rights has used that ordinary,…
Category: Community Policing
The Use of Sound Weapons Against Peaceful Demonstrators as a Threat to Human Rights and a Factor Undermining Trust in the Police (Đorović and Others v. Serbia)
On 15 March 2025, Belgrade saw one of the largest peaceful demonstrations in Serbia’s recent history, the culmination of a protest movement that had been building for months after the collapse of a concrete canopy at the railway station in Novi Sad in November 2024, in which people died. Students and a significant part of…
War, Total Surveillance, and The Collapse of Social Control (Criminological Reflections on the Paradox of the Panopticon in Armed Conflict)
Contemporary criminology has long theorised surveillance as the cornerstone of social control. From Bentham’s Panopticon to Foucault’s disciplinary society, and from Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of the “synopticon” to other surveillance studies, the prevailing assumption holds that the totalising gaze of the state and its apparatuses produces order, compliance, and the internalisation of norms. Yet armed…
New State Law Requires Additional Safeguards When Police Use Generative AI
Gov. Gavin Newsom this month signed a first-of-its-kind California law requiring police to disclose how they use generative artificial intelligence, a move aimed at boosting transparency and public trust. California is among the first states to address the issue. The reporting was cited in the legislative analysis of the bill that ultimately became the law. Senate Bill…
Victoria Copeland, Alan Dettlaff: How Carceral Violence Persists Through the Surveillance, Punishment, and Regulation of Families
Although conceptualizations of the carceral state have become more expansive in recent years to include systems beyond prisons and policing, the child welfare system has often eluded this conceptualization due to a societal perception that it protects vulnerable children from harm. Despite this, the system has continued to function as a system of social control…
Roy Bailey: The Сrisis in Policing:
Policing faces an unprecedented crisis. It is important for policy makers to understand fully why we have witnessed such a collapse in public confidence for an organisation that has traditionally enjoyed wide support. The significance of policing in Liberal Democracies like ours cannot be overstated. The ‘thin blue line’, as police officers like to see…
Vasyl Bohdan, Head of the Juvenile Police of Ukraine: the Police Have Received Nearly 70 reports from Children Regarding Attempts to Recruit Them by Russians
The full-scale war has had a significant impact on everyone in Ukrainian society, including children. Russians are committing many crimes against them – children are being injured by Russian shelling, they are being taken to Russian territory, etc. In addition, Russia is also involving Ukrainian children in acts of sabotage and terrorist attacks against their…
Andrii Chernousov: Children in War, or How Russia Kills the Childhood
The Russian Federation continues to involve Ukrainian children in the War violating numerous international standards and treaties. Forced displacement of Ukrainian children remains widespread in territories that are temporarily occupied or under constant shelling. At the same time, there is still no single transparent algorithm or mechanism that allows Ukrainian children deported to Russia to…
Khatia Dekanoidze: Police Reform in Ukraine: Achievements and Failures
The Soviet Union established a deeply corrupt and flawed criminal justice system designed to protect itself. Infiltrated by organised crime, it essentially functioned as a criminal body. Following the Soviet collapse, except for the Baltic states, corruption, clan-based structures, nepotism, and human rights violations persisted in the newly independent republics, mirroring the Soviet framework. It…