Police Accountability - towards international standards (POLARCS)

Against the backdrop of increased powers and resources granted to police agencies for combating terrorism and other newly perceived threats in many mature democracies, the POLACS project compares levels of empowerment for citizens through accountability mechanisms (independent external oversight bodies, police complaints procedures and similar schemes). Additional police powers, technologies and transnational police networks add to the already far-reaching powers that police agencies have, granting the police new and powerful ways of monitoring and interfering in citizens' lives and thus their fundamental rights.

Yet, it has often proven to be very difficult to get the reform of police complaints procedures onto the political agenda. Today, with audio-video recording equipment becoming ubiquitous and with encounters between police and members of the public disseminated instantly via the internet, the issue has moved from the fringes to the mainstream as a live political issue.

Researchers from Canada, France, Germany, the UK and Japan will be cooperating in the POLACS project. The research also covers other countries with well-established police oversight bodies, e.g. Australia, the US and the Netherlands.

In the light of persistent public concerns in many democratic countries about effective police accountability, particularly in cases of death or serious injury to members of the public, there is an urgent need to improve the empirical basis for comparison of external independent police accountability schemes and to develop international standards for 'good practice'. The project also includes the accountability of transnational policing within institutional frameworks, such as Interpol or the European Union's Area of Freedom, Security and Justice, as well as in transnational police networks.

For transnational policing, mostly situated outside national parliamentary oversight and access to justice, accountability can be perceived as particularly deficient.

The academic investigators involved in the POLACS project, with their theoretical and empirical expertise on police accountability, will revise and adapt current accountability theories and standards to the empirical reality that has been rapidly developing since the 1990s. A comparative methodological approach is adopted as the most effective way to contextualise performance of national and sub-national schemes and a necessary basis for developing international standards for 'good practice'.

Currently policy-makers, practitioners and activists involved in reforming external police accountability mechanisms face great difficulties in contextualising current schemes with other schemes, past and present, as the available qualitative insights and quantitative data are often not comparable. Only by bringing existing data and knowledge together will it be possible to contextualise national and sub-national police accountability schemes and identify what data and insights are missing. This will inform the empirical research undertaken by both this project and subsequent research.