On TurningPoints' Work with Law Enforcement Institutions

Assumptions – law enforcement research and interventions

If task description, recruitment, training and organizing of professional law enforcement ’units’ are developed, their socialization into authoritarian and violent ethics, identities, attitudes and behavior – as a group – will change and direct violence will be reduced

Background

Law enforcement institutions are by mandated (elected politicians) or not mandated power holders (dictators) given the task to create and maintain a certain social order. In order to meet this task, law enforcement institutions recruit and organize after known and described historical logics. Both historically and sociologically, it has repeatedly been shown that institutional recruitment change as government change: from a socially narrow recruitment of loyal persons in dictatorship led states to a wide and democratically representative recruitment in states full democracies. These changes result in different ideas and understandings of the task of ’law enforcement’.

Internally law enforcement institutions organize and socialize around the principle of division of tasks and professional skills. Tasks and skills are organized in groups that become the central ’actor’ in law enforcement. In other words it is not the individual person who is in focus when working with institutional law enforcement, rather it is the doctrine, directive, the ’unit’ and ’the profession’ with a certain set of recruited, trained and socialized ethics, identities, attitudes and behavior.

General preconditions

1) Where there is no or low political will, access to police enforcement institutions also become limited. In such circumstances building of trust and relations even with an authori­tarian regime becomes necessary and the main purpose as this will open for later research, change and development processes. 2) Two interlinked dimensions of law enforcement are necessary in the development of law enforcement institutions: first – the change of the task from the enforcement of authoritarian rules to the conflict resolution between democratic conflict of interests; and secondly – the change of the attitudes of the profession. 3) The central ‘actor’ of learning is the professional ‘unit’. 3) The learning process must be described, understood and carried out as a professionaliza­tion of the police. 5) Central to political will and institutional openness to professionalization is the understanding of the process as a process of demilitarization and de-colonialization of the police. 6) The learning processesmust be directed towards experienced adults working under command under a general doctrine consisting of a number of differentiated directives and in a group with a specific social cohesion – in short: group based inductive learning. 7) As the central objective is the changing of the behaviour of the profession, the learning processes must rest on and be directed towards the practice (tacit behavior, bodily routines) of the profes­sional ‘units’. This means that the profound difference between the rational logic of law discourse and the empirical behavior of practise in law enforcement is realised, understood and overcome by TurningPoints’ staff. 8) It must be realized that a professionalized law enforce­ment institution cannot function properly (democratically) under the old conditions. This means that organi­zing, leadership, uniforms, equipment and police stations must also be updated – this is essen­tial. 9) In the process of professionalizing the police, this process mustbe introduced to and open for the public to participate in – so that new ideas, new concepts, new trust, new social capacities and new routinized public-police behavior can be gradually developed. 10) A stabi­li­zing and guiding framework of three vertical cross cutting under­standings and co-ord­i­na­tions as well as an understanding of the differences in terms of actors, behavior and time scopes is necessary in this type of interventions. They are: top level policy (political will)(+25 years); middle range institutional level (4-5 years) and grass root level (0-1 years). 11) It must be realized that parallel investigations to accuse and prosecute as well as scientific dis­se­mination of trusted information in the early phase of the trust building phase probably will jeopardize the process andhinder further access and potential development. 12) Politicians as well as state institutions compare, compete and are therefore interested in each others’ findings and development. Used cleverly, this can be used to build trust. A continuous pro­gramme must be put up in which states, institutions and researchers can access new and relevant information for their own develop­ment. If the information is presented as con­struc­tive democratic learning processes of pro­fessional law enforcement institutions in which errors occur this will produce more trust and pave the way for more openness. A first step to build a programme will be to identify 4 states at the 4 different democratically levels: 1) full democracies; 2) flawed democracies; 3) hybrid regimes; and 4 authoritarian states. See illustration below: