COMPOSITE Newsletter Issue 2

COMPOSITE is a research project in 10 European countries that looks into large scale change processes in police forces all over Europe and attempts to find out what factors contribute to success or failure of these change processes.

This August newsletter of the project "Comparative Police Studies in the EU" contains information to the following subjects:

Given the fact that the future of policing in the 21st century in Europe will probably be shaped by restricted resources, the need to deal with a more diverse and complex crime and last not least the requirement to apply more diverse instruments to tackle these problems, it makes sense to equip police leaders with the means to formulate a strategy, focus their resources, and empower their organisations to meet the challenges of the future.

Work package 10 aims at developing a specific training package for police leaders that takes into account the specific findings of COMPOSITE research in ten European countries. The COMPOSITE Strategic Management Training Package (CSMTP) offers an innovative concept to the specific needs of police organisations, using the international and interdisciplinary approach that is the basis of the COMPOSITE project. In order to reach senior officers and decision makers in the national police forces, these courses will be offered in the national languages. A central feature of the CSMTP will therefore be train-the-trainer-courses to train disseminators to teach courses in their native language, and write training manuals for these courses that will be translated into the national languages. It is planned to gradually implement courses on strategic management in the curricula of police academies in Europe. This will ensure training courses tailored to the special needs and characteristics of Europe’s police forces and can be seen as a good opportunity to close the existing gap in the field of strategic management courses for the police.

The leader of work package 10 is the IT services and business consultancy company Capgemini Telecom Media Defence in France and the Netherlands. They aim to develop tools and instruments that will help to contribute to a better understanding of organisational change while identifying changes and trends in policing.

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2.	Announcement: Police Research and Science Conference in St. Cyrau Mont D’Or (France) in September 2012

The annual CEPOL conference will be held at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Police near Lyon (France) on September 25th to 27th, 2012. The conference focuses on on-going police science projects in Europe, such as COMPOSITE, and is dealing with some key questions which came up in a publication of "Police Science Perspectives: Towards a European Approach". In this report a group of six renowned police scientists were asked to reflect on developments in crime, public disorder and society in general and find answers to a set of questions such as the existence of a common European understanding of police, policing, police philosophy and the role of the police in society. As it is stated in the conference programme, conference participants will reflect on the development of and future prospects for a European approach to police science.

The COMPOSITE project will be presented on September 25th by Dr. Gabriele Jacobs, COMPOSITE project coordinator from the Rotterdam School of Management (RMS) of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Dr. Petra Saskia Bayerl, post-doctoral researcher at the RMS of the Erasmus University and member of the Dutch COMPOSITE country-team, will present data from a survey regarding social media.

Further information on the CEPOL conference can be found here: http://www.cepol.europa.eu/index.php?id=research-science-conferences.

Mario Gruschinske and Nathalie Hirschmann, COMPOSITE researchers of the University of Applied Sciences of the State Police of Brandenburg (Germany), will give a presentation at the 15th conference on Empirical Police Science, which will take place on September 13th to 15th, 2012 at the University for police Villingen-Schwenningen (Germany) on "Implicit Concepts of Police Networking". The presentation will focus on networking strategies used by European police forces to manage the expectations, concerns and issues of their external stakeholders. The presentation will be based on the results of the external stakeholder analysis conducted in work package 1 of the COMPOSITE project.

More information regarding the conference programme and conference registration can be found here: http://www.empirische-polizeiforschung.de/tagungen-z.php.

Gascó-Hernández, Mila & Saz-Carranza, Angel (2012): Inter-organizational Coordination: How Police Forces Relate to Political Principals, Judicial Bodies, and Other Police Forces.

Abstract: "This exploratory paper aims at understanding how several police forces across Europe manage their relationships with three of the main actors they must coordinate with: politicians, judges and prosecutors, and other police forces. The paper particularly refers to the specific case of two Spanish police forces: the Catalan police force and the Madrid local police force. Our main research question is exploratory in nature: how do police forces relate to other security forces and to political and judicial principals? Methodologically, the paper is part of a wider FP7 research, COMPOSITE (COmparative POlice Studies in the European Union)."

This paper was presented by Mila Gascó-Hernández and Angel Saz-Carranza at the XVI Annual Conference of the International Research Society for Public Management (IRSPM) within panel 15 "New Ideas About Interorganisational Collaborations" on April 12th, 2012. The conference took place at the School of Economics at the University of Tor Vergata in Rome (Italy) on April 11th to 13th, 2012. The full paper can be downloaded here.

Further information regarding the IRSPM conference visit: http://www.irspm2012.com/.

SecureComm, the 8thInternational Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks, will take place in Padua (Italy) on September 3rd to 5th, 2012. "The annual SecureComm is a leading international forum that covers all aspects of secure communications and networking. The aim of SecureComm is to bring together security and privacy experts in academia, industry and government as well as practitioners, standards developers and policy makers, in order to engage in a discussion about common goals and explore important research directions in the field. SecureComm also serves as a venue for learning about state-of-the-art in security and privacy research, giving attendees the opportunity to network with experts in the field."

The early registration deadline is on August 3rd, 2012. To find out more about the conference programme, conference fee and other practical information visit: http://securecomm.org/2012/show/home.

COMPOSITE Newsletter Issue 2 - August 2012