Police training programmes are a basic feature of all police forces’ organisational approach, used both as a means of socialisation and reform. Yet there is little knowledge of how training affects police behaviour.
Principal Investigator: Professor Paul Montgomery
CEBI is currently partnering with the Israeli Border Police (IBP) to assess policing in Israel. The IBP is mandated with policing of protests and large-scale public disorder as well as of serious crime. It has been sanctioned in the past for using unlawful force, and as a result, efforts have been made to instil values and reduce police violence, particularly by cultivating sensitivity to democratic norms and human rights. This project is helping to support these efforts.
The John Fell OUP Fund has supported a feasibility study, which examined the education unit of the IBP. CEBI’s ongoing work, led by Paul Montgomery (Principal Investigator) and Yael Litmanovitz (Researcher), involves evaluating the current training model, assessing existing evidence of ‘what works’ in professional training, creating an evidence-based training manual focusing on democratic skills for policing protests, and piloting the intervention.
The findings have been presented to the Israeli Minister of Public Security and at several academic conferences:
- EUROCRIM 2014 Prague: the 14th annual conference of the European Society of Criminology
- Policing, boundaries and the state - the changing landscape of sovereignty and security: The inaugural seminar of the Young Nordic Police Research Network, University of Oslo
Further information
British Society of Criminology annual conference (July 2012)
The Oxford Centre for Criminology’s Police Professionalism Seminar (April 2012)
The Graduate Research Conference at Oxford University’s Department of Education (March 2012)