Preliminary Programme

This paper examines the relationships between British and German police officers in the British occupation zone. As the British military government viewed the German police as an organisation which had strongly supported and carried out National Socialist ideas, they reorganised the force in 1945, dismissed many officers, disarmed the remaining officers and introduced a uniformed women police. By this, they intended to implement a democratic police organisation based on the British model.
British public safety officers controlled the development of the force. Besides, German male and female officers carried out raids together with the military police. This included close contact between British and German officers and supervision of the latter in the immediate postwar years.
This paper focuses on mutual perceptions: Based on which kind of information, convictions and sentiments did the British plan the reorganization of the police? How far did these views differ from the experiences the British officers made in Germany and how far did these influence official policies? And on the other hand: How did the German policemen and -women perceive the British officers who had the power to dismiss them and who often placed them in a difficult position between the military government and their own population? How far did they cooperate or refuse to obey orders? The paper discusses the interaction between British and German officers from the early days of the occupation of Germany until the mid-1950s and the way in which the mutual images changed in official policy, in public debates on policing and in daily work. (Show less)

Many criminologists consider that transnational policing in the Western hemisphere began in the mid-nineteenth century, as a result of the political upheavals and economic instability arising from the turbulent times of the late 1840s. However, few academics have delved further back in time to see if this was actually the case. This paper argues that the antecedents of transnational policing can in fact be traced back much further to the activities of the Bow Street ‘Runners’ (the world’s first professional detective police), who operated from the mid-eighteenth century onward. It concentrates on their activities on the European continent in the first half of the nineteenth century and demonstrates through the use of several case studies that the ‘Runners’ and the Bow Street policing system can be seen as the instigators of what we now know as transnational policing. (Show less)

Transnational policing as a concept represents a disparate and disjointed assortment of structures, processes, relationships, networks and organisations, which shift and change over time, often with remarkable speed. The vast assemblage that is now addressed under the heading of transnational policing has become increasingly complex. New mechanisms and relationships have been established as older ones have died out, normally without an overarching ethos or strategy. The increasing complexity and fragmentation of the transnational policing field in recent years somewhat ironically appears to have occurred at the same time as a significant slowdown of academic interest in transnational policing as a distinct subject. Three 'waves' of academic interest can somewhat loosely be identified over the past three decades. Tracing the evolving academic study of transnational policing from 1990 to 2019, the paper will consider, from an accountability perspective, the future trajectories of academic enquiry. (Show less)