Police and Adolescents in Multi-Ethnic Societies. Interactions and Mutual Perceptions between Police Forces and (Minority) Adolescents in France and Germany

该项目旨在提高对城市环境中紧张局势和集体暴力的原因的认识，并了解多民族社会中青少年警察合法性的来源。在德国和法国，少数民族现在占城市人口的很大一部分，特别是处于社会边缘的下层阶级。尽管如此，像法国那样的大规模骚乱到目前为止还没有在德国发生。除了不同程度的社会劣势和分裂之外，警察的质量和警察与少数民族的关系可以解释这种差异。我们补充了广泛持有的假设，即少数民族地位构成了独特的解释因素，并假设社会经济劣势和空间隔离是一种重要力量-至少与种族一样重要-驱动犯罪/暴力以及青少年与警察之间的紧张关系（以及可能的歧视性警察做法）。我们在包括警察合法性和社区社会（des）整合的理论框架中分析警察与青少年的互动。与相同的研究设计和实施进行跨国比较，将通过增加宏观层面条件的差异来解决这些难题，这些条件一方面可能是青年行为的决定因素（社会、经济、种族条件），另一方面可能是警察行为的决定因素（体制、组织、工作人员组成条件）。在德国和法国，选择了两个不同规模的城市，以减少不适当地推广到国家层面的风险。在对居住在社区内的青少年（每个国家5 000人）进行定量学校调查的同时，将通过面谈和实地观察的方式对警察行为和组织结构进行定性分析。学校调查的主要目的是获得关于青少年与警察有关的态度和经验的标准化资料，以检验关于关键理论概念的假设，并在种族群体、邻里环境和国家之间进行系统比较。研究的定性部分将产生关于态度和相互作用的深入信息，否则无法收集这些信息。这项研究的结果将为一个重要的社会问题提供更严格的答案，并可以为弱势城市地区的社会政策和警察战略提供信息。

This project aims at improving the knowledge about the causes of tensions and collective violence in urban settings and understanding the sources of legitimacy of the police among adolescents in multi-ethnic societies. In both Germany and France, minorities now represent a large share of the urban population, in particular of the marginalized social underclass. Nonetheless, large-scale riots like in France have failed to materialise in Germany so far. Apart from varying levels of social disadvantage and disintegration, the quality of policing and of police-minority relations may explain this discrepancy. We supplement the widely held assumption that ethnic minority status constitutes the distinctive explanatory factor with the hypothesis that socio-economic disadvantage and spatial segregation is a significant force - at least as important as ethnicity - driving both crime/violence as well as tensions between adolescents and the police (and possibly discriminatory police practices). We analyse police-adolescent interactions in a theoretical framework which includes police legitimacy and community social (des)integration.A cross-national comparison with identical study design and implementation will be decisive to solve these puzzles by increasing the variance of macro-level conditions which may stand among the determinants of youth behaviour (social, economic, ethnic conditions) on the one hand and police behaviour on the other hand (institutional, organizational, staff composition conditions). In Germany and France, two cities of different sizes are selected in order reduce the risk of undue generalization to the national level. A quantitative school survey among adolescents nested within neighbourhoods (N-5,000 in each country) will be paralleled by a qualitative analysis of police behaviour and organizational structure by ways of interviews and field observations. The principal aim of the school survey is to gain standardized information on police-related attitudes and experiences of adolescents for testing hypotheses on key theoretical concepts and for systematic comparisons between ethnic groups, neighbourhood contexts and countries. The qualitative part of the study will produce in-depth information on attitudes and interactions which could not otherwise be gathered.The results of this study will produce more rigorous answers to an important social question and could inform social policies and police strategies in disadvantaged urban areas.