Police Accountability - towards international standards (POLARCS)

在许多成熟的民主国家，警察机构在打击恐怖主义和其他新发现的威胁方面获得的权力和资源有所增加，在此背景下，POLACS项目比较了通过问责机制（独立的外部监督机构、警察投诉程序和类似计划）赋予公民权力的程度。新的警察权力、技术和跨国警察网络增加了警察机构已经具有的广泛权力，使警察有了新的、强有力的方式来监测和干预公民的生活，从而也就干预了他们的基本权利。然而，事实证明，将投诉警察程序的改革提上政治议程往往非常困难。今天，随着录音录像设备的普及，以及警察和公众之间的接触通过互联网即时传播，这个问题已经从边缘变成了一个活生生的政治问题。来自加拿大、法国、德国、英国和日本的研究人员将合作参与POLACS项目。研究亦涵盖其他设有完善警察监察机构的国家，例如澳大利亚、美国及荷兰。鉴于许多民主国家公众对有效的警察问责，特别是在公众死亡或严重受伤的情况下，持续表示关切，迫切需要改善外部独立警察问责计划比较的经验基础，并制定“良好做法”的国际标准。该项目还包括在国际刑警组织或欧洲联盟的自由、安全和正义区等体制框架内以及在跨国警察网络内对跨国警务工作的问责。对于大多处于国家议会监督和诉诸司法之外的跨国警务而言，问责制可被视为特别欠缺，参与POLACS项目的学术调查人员将凭借其在警察问责制方面的理论和经验专长，修订和调整目前的问责制理论和标准，以适应自1990年代以来迅速发展的经验现实。比较方法学的方法被采用作为最有效的方式，contextualising国家和次国家计划的性能和必要的基础，为“良好做法”的国际标准的发展。目前，参与改革外部警察问责机制的政策制定者、从业人员和活动家在将现有计划与过去和现在的其他计划联系起来时面临很大困难，因为现有的定性见解和定量数据往往不具有可比性。只有将现有的数据和知识结合起来，才有可能将国家和国家以下各级的警察问责计划结合起来，并确定缺少哪些数据和见解。这将为本项目和后续研究进行的实证研究提供信息。

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.