Representatives from each of the 10 COMPOSITE countries met in Barcelona, Spain for a consortium meeting in September 2011. This meeting provided an ideal forum for looking back at the experiences and insights from the first year and looking forward to the opportunities and challenges of Year 2.

We started by reflecting on the successes of COMPOSITE’s first year, with presentations from Arjan van den Born and Melody Barlage outlining findings from Work Package 1 on environmental opportunities and threats, and stakeholder analysis. Discussions then turned to the ongoing work on case studies and police typologies (work package 2), knowledge sharing interviews (work package 3), dissemination activities (work package 9) and training and monitoring (work package 10). Once again these discussions were extremely fruitful, providing the opportunity for interesting topic-related dialogues and debates. Finally we looked ahead to the forthcoming Action Line 2 topics of identity and leadership, and discussed how we may develop and integrate different COMPOSITE research streams in the future.  This consortium meeting was a great success, generating interesting and vibrant research discussions within great surroundings.

Our thanks go to Mila and ESADE University for their warm welcome and immaculate hosting of this event.