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ABSTRACT
By analysing French and German police stop and search on the streets based on embedded observations in police patrols and findings of a large school survey, this article comparatively questions their determinants. Control practices diverge in their frequency: the German police officers control less proactively than their French counterparts. The targets of controls also differ: a concentration on visible minorities is much more pervasive among the French police officers. These divergences may be explained by contrasted professional orientations, especially the importance given to the crime control agenda, and state/society relations.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 In France, ID checks are regulated by the article 78 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. In Germany, they are defined by the Federal Code of Criminal Procedure and by the police laws of the different Länder.
2 These suspicious behaviours were identified through direct observation and/or informal debrief with police officers. Among the interactions with an ID check and/or search, we have excluded: (a) controls resulting from a clear law breaking (for instance the absence of valid tickets and IDs when controlled in public transport, breach of the Highway Code or – more rarely – criminal act) and (b) controls resulting from a suspicious behaviour (such as someone throwing away something as the police arrive, an apparently too young person driving a car, persons involved in a violent dispute, etc.)
3 Grant reference: ANR-08-FASHS-19, Pacte research unit (Sciences Po, CNRS, University of Grenoble Alpes) and DFG AL 376-11/1, Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law, Freiburg.
4 Police are in the hands of Länder (apart from the Border Control police and the Criminal Federal police, but they are not studied here).
5 By police–citizen encounters, we mean more or less durable contacts (either verbal or physical) between police and citizens. It can be a mere verbal exchange or a sequence of interactions entailing verbal and physical contacts.
6 In France, the survey sample is representative of the young adolescent population in the metropolitan area of Grenoble and of Lyon which are the major municipalities of the second largest and wealthiest region of France, Rhône-Alpes. The sample population resembles urban France in terms of age, sex and school level. It departs from the rural parts of the countries in terms of SES since such areas display more farmers or workers as parents’ professions than the urbanised sectors. In Germany, the survey population is representative of the young adolescent population in the cities of Cologne and Mannheim, two large cities in the western part of Germany with very high shares of migrant populations. The sample of schools includes public and private secondary schools of all academic levels excluding those for special needs. Thanks to the very large sample sizes (overall ca. 13,500 in France and 7000 in Germany) and the high share of adolescents with migrant backgrounds, the survey offers unique opportunities to analyse the experiences and attitudes of adolescents from ethnic minorities (as well as of native adolescents) without quickly running into the problem of small numbers.
7 The work of youth officers is usually characterised by the supervision of serious juvenile offenders or specific controls of young people during special events.
8 In Cologne and Mannheim, we did not observe plain-clothes units whose main mandate is to search for drugs. These units may have more crime control-oriented practices than the ones we have observed.
9 In contrast to France, the concept of community police is well established in Germany. The 16 states (Länder) and to some extend local police forces are responsible for the implementation of community policing. In Cologne, each police precinct employs several community police officers who are in charge of local networking (e.g. school visits) and crime prevention by proactive police work. The community police officers are frequently in contact with local juveniles. Usually, they have already worked on their beat for several years or decades. In Mannheim, community policing is less elaborated, but ‘reach out’ work with adolescents is an important task of special youth officers whereas patrol police officers are in charge of proactive police work as identity checks.
10 Contrary to other analyses, we are not here capable of comparing these numbers to the available population at the time of control. If this limits the reliability of results, the use of the available population as benchmark has been discussed. And our method authorised more qualitative input in the analysis (see below).
11 After controlling for the benchmark population, the authors demonstrate that ‘depending on the location, a Black was 3.3 times more likely to be stopped than a White, with similar figures for Arabs (1.8/14.8 times more likely)’ (Jobard et al., Citation2012, p. 364).