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: Police
Rent on Prohibition of Sex Work: How State Generates Police Corruption
On 20 May 2026, the Office of the Prosecutor General and the Security Service of Ukraine conducted a large-scale anti-corruption operation targeting the National Police of Ukraine. Investigative actions were carried out simultaneously across three regional police departments – Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil, and Zhytomyr oblasts. Five individuals were served with notices of suspicion: the head and…
The Kyiv Tragedy of 18 April 2026: A Criminological and Human Rights Analysis
Holosiivskyi district of Kyiv. A typical Saturday. A busy supermarket. An armed man opens fire on the crowd, then barricades himself inside the building, taking hostages. The result: six dead, over 15 wounded, including a child. A raid was carried out by KORD special forces, and the attacker was neutralised. The weapon used by the…
The Algorithm as Witness: Errors in the Criminal Justice System Through the Lens of Technological Determinism
On 29 March 2026, CNN published a report on a case that might have been dismissed as yet another instance of bureaucratic negligence, were it not for one crucial detail: the basis for the arrest of a Tennessee resident was facial recognition carried out by Clearview AI — a company with a database containing billions…
“Motherland” Protects Its Fraudsters: Russia Is Building a Telephone Iron Wall
Russia has taken another step toward ensuring the safety of its citizens — and, as one might guess, toward achieving its own telecommunications self-sufficiency. According to the second package of “anti-fraud measures,” which the State Duma passed in its first reading in February, the government plans to block incoming international calls to landlines for Russians…
“We’ll Be Closing the Windows”: The Self-Isolation of Russian Society as a Performance of a Carceral State
— How many open windows do we have in total? — They’re all open. — We don’t know when to stop. Well then, we’ll close the open windows. Yevgeny Schwartz. “To Slay the Dragon” (1944) There is a particular kind of academic ‘stagnation’: when a phenomenon is so vast and so obvious that the scientific…
Anesthesia of Consumption and Surgery of Control: A Two-Phase Model of Authoritarian Governance of the Digital Space in Russia
Social science has long sought to explain why citizens of authoritarian states do not mount mass resistance against systems that openly restrict their rights. Traditional answers reduce to either fear of repression or ideological indoctrination. Neither, however, fully accounts for the phenomenon observed in post-Soviet Russia at the turn of the twenty-first century: the relatively…
‘No Air Raid Siren Will Stop an Intimate Massage When the Time is Right’: Analysis of Police Statistics on Creation of Brothels
The data on offenses of creating or running brothels and procuring in Ukraine from 2013 to 2025 reveals significant fluctuations that reflect both law enforcement priorities and broader societal disruptions. The period reached its peak in 2014, when authorities registered 509 crimes and issued 379 notifications, representing the highest level of documented activity throughout the…
The Russian Full-Scale Invasion and Crime in Ukraine: A Wartime Analysis of Criminal Justice Dynamics (2013-2025)
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 marked not only a military and humanitarian catastrophe but also a critical juncture for the country’s criminal justice system. The past four years of war have had a pronounced negative impact on Ukrainian society and the criminal justice system, fundamentally altering crime patterns and revealing systemic…